OK this is a bad one, and will require a visit to the server. The system is a little ill and the kind of maintenance it needs can only really be done at the server itself. There will be no image uploads here until then.

FWIW this represents a failing disk so the entire Cellar may have to move to another server.

Sorry UT! I know you don't need this aggravation.

That sounds ominous...

So... I can't get chat to work... is that just me? or is it a related issue?

Related. A lot of things will be broken.

Now may be a good time to his the tip mug. I'm not sure exactly how much I'll have to replace. :(

Gotcha, I'll see what I can do UT :) we'll help out.

Thanks and also, another thing that's temporarily broken is the tipmug fill level updating :( :)

The Cellar messages themselves are stored in a database on a different server and so you can rest assured that they will not be lost.

Goddamn. We are up and running on a different server.

:p:

And images work! Haven't tried chat yet.

OK, it's also mind-bogglingly fast right now because it's going to take a while for everyone's local DNS to be updated with the right server IP. Users may take as long as a day to be able to reach us.

You da man, Undertoad!

On that note, my PC still can't get here, but my phone can. That amuses me. Can't (don't wanna) tipmug from my phone, but I'll be sure to once I've got secure access. You're awesome, Tony.

:blush: Thanks y'all!

Technical explanation:

Early this morning, while the system was getting backed up, the server reported a bunch of disk errors. For safety purposes, it put itself into a "read only" state.

You might recall that the Cellar itself is on a different server than its database. This is why the forum's messaging system continued to work; new posts could be saved, because they weren't not being saved to the read-only cellar.org, they were being saved to the database server.

And that's why I could restore the forum pretty quickly. I just moved the code to another server, and told the Internet that cellar.org should point to that server instead of the old one. The massive database didn't need to move... just the Cellar code that points to it.

Tip Mug considerations:

The server that the Cellar is now on was never meant to manage the Cellar. This server is ancient, in Internet terms. It has almost no memory (256MB, yes MB), and it may slow down terribly once all the users and search engine spiders find it.

What I notice is that there are many fine rackmount servers on the eBay right now. Unless I'm mistaken, many of them seem to be going for well under their actual value. I think this is part of a trend away from running such servers, but it might do us a real solid favor and give us a new home for cellar.org.

SO: any mug donations that happen through Friday will go into the eBay New Used Server fund, and if there are enough of them I'll try to buy two to also replace the current database server. That will make things really speedy.

do you have something like an actual dollar target, like all the other telethons and pledge drives do?

You may reply by pm if you wish, or no reply at all, of course.

is the original of this image rotated 90 deg counterclockwise?