I have some disheartening news for most visitors (including the moderators), and will probably come as a surprise to many. I ask that folks here read it with an open mind.
All good things...
I'm going around to certain forums of the more popular sites we host and provide a link to this, as I don't have recent/active Email addresses for everyone. And in some cases (like nesdev), I want to be as open and up front as possible.
There are a lot of reasons (some financial, many personal) for my decision, but I ask that folks be as respectful of it as much as possible. I know it will be a stressor, as change this big often results in shock and disappointment or frustration, but please understand that it's something that I have been thinking about for the past 6 months and finally came to a decision. Making that decision was one of the most difficult things I've had to do in my entire life.
If you have any comments/concerns/etc. that you'd rather not voice publicly, contact me here (or via any of the mentioned means) and I'll do my best to answer.
Remember: keep your chins up -- it's not the end of the world. :-)
(Footnote for other mods: feel free to split this, change it to an announcement, or whatever -- I'm not sure what gets the most coverage)
Sad news, indeed. I imagine someone will step up to continue hosting this forum, though. So it's all good.
Sad news indeed, but life must go own. I hope nothing bad happened to you.
Should we make another thread regarding the planning on how to get nesdev forum and the wiki on another server? We still have a few months to do it.
I need to find a solution for the wiki
For us it'd just be a matter of moving the forums and the wiki to somewhere else.
The nesdev main page has been abandoned since about 2005 and like 90% of the links here are 404 errors so loosing it won't be a big loss (I'm sorry Memblers but that is really the case...)
The forums are still very active, and we already moved them from another place back in 2004 I think. So it's not a big deal. Most of the thread here contains no interesting info or info that has already been documented somewhere - some thread contains relevant info that is nowhere else to be found so I think it should be important to document it somewhere.
Many people put efforts into documenting things as properly as possible on the wiki. Yet I can't refrain to thing it's still a huge mess of info that is not organized properly. Sorry but again this just is the case, and I am probably also responsible for that.
Yet the wiki is still somewhat precious as it's better to find all info in a single place than have them spread everywhere.
I agree with Bregalad that the main page isn't that important anymore...(Altough a backup for reference/old time sake stored somewhere would be a good thing.) What worries me more is who's gonna take up hosting...It costs money ya know! Donations perhaps?
Just writing this as a reminder here (to myself and others) that the stuff from
http://blargg.parodius.com needs to be saved (I doubt blargg will be around to do it).
If we move to a new site, I'll be happy to design and program the main page to bring it to a more current look and replace some of the data with just more specific/unspecific links to everything like nerdy nights, the wiki, other peoples projects, etc. I'm sad that this won't be the place any more and wish I could help financially with it but the HTML part is the only thing I can really offer to help with some stuff to make the process easier and in the end better for everyone. I hope somebody else hosts the site too. I can't imagine what I'd be derping with today if these forums didn't help me so much and all of you guys didn't answer my mostly stupid questions in the beginning. A big thank you to all you guys, especially koitsu, for everything you have provided and made possible so far.
ETA: As for financially helping, I say we need to make sure the NESDev compo happen and get everything done on time, the cart sales profit could be a big helper to whoever helps with the hosting, I'd be glad to program some stuff up, even with others as a group, to get some money coming to anything NESDev related, especially the forums.
Some of the wiki is poorly organized, but it's still being actively worked on, if slowly. I've lately been trying to improve the articles about expansion audio. I sincerely hope we can continue to work on it.
There's a lot of great stuff on these forums as well. I'd hate to lose any of it.
Is there a way to download an archive of the wiki?
Anyhow, thanks for all the time you did host this place. I'm very glad it exists.
I, or rather, my server, may be available for temporary hosting purposes.
I used to host TASVideos from its creation in 2003 to late 2009, and the server on which I ran it (situated at my home) is still available.*
I cannot guarantee long-term hosting though. (The reasons for which I gave out TASVideos still apply.)
It also has a very low uplink bandwidth (around 100 kB/s total, shared between all concurrent clients), so hosting large downloads is not practical. (It was this way during TASVideos as well.) Currently NESDev does not have large downloads anywhere, does it?
The earliest I could start any concrete actions towards such migration practically is about 3 weeks from now.
*) Debian LAMP with 6 GiB RAM, though I need to investigate a virtual server solution if I want to give adminship to some others, as the server is also the storage for all of my personal data and I cannot figure out how to set file/directory privileges in such manner that it's not too inconvenient for myself.
Btw Koitsu...does this mean we'll see alot less of you? Or do you plan to stick around at least a little?
So what's next? Piggyback nesdev onto some random person's Dreamhost account?
Jeroen wrote:
Btw Koitsu...does this mean we'll see alot less of you? Or do you plan to stick around at least a little?
That's actually quite sweet (of a question). :-) Yeah I'll still be around, rest assured.
Edit: Heh, shortly after the announcement, someone started massively downloading all of the content from numerous hosted sites here (nesdev, nesworld, JE in specific) using wget, which is absolutely the wrong thing to do (such utilities get stuck indefinitely on forums/boards). I just had to firewall them off. Some people...
Edit #2: And now about 30 minutes ago some dude in Argentina doing the same thing. I wish people would settle down.
Edit #3: And today (05/01) I found someone whose leeching client downloaded the site 3 separate times in the past 3 days, and got stuck in an infinite loop (like they all do), so I had to firewall them off. IP was an ADSL connection somewhere in the south (I'm guessing Tennessee). IP had never visited the site before either (looked back numerous weeks). Real cute. Here's a graph showing what I'm talking about:
Edit #4: Same guy in edit #3 somehow changed his IP address (def. same guy; HTTP client string is the same, IP is within the same /16 netblock) and started up again a little after 10:00 PDT. Quite a persistent son of a bitch...
Edit #5: Same guy changing IPs again, this time into an entirely new netblock to get around things, but same ISP. I swear if I find out who this dickhead is there's going to be trouble. Doesn't even bother to read anything on the forum or the site to see what's going on.
Edit #6: Same guy just started up again a little after 23:00 PDT. Once more, changed his IP to a new netblock (same ISP though). I *could* block him based on HTTP client string, but the client string he's using is a total lie anyway (and I can tell what web browser he usually uses vs. the leeching application), so there's really no point. Dude, just give up already.
Dwedit wrote:
So what's next? Piggyback nesdev onto some random person's Dreamhost account?
You could always give Xkeeper a ring. We tend to dabble in
dorky video game stuff anyway.
TCRF only successfully loads about 45% of the time, no hosting from their host, please.
It wouldn't be from the host we use for TCRF.
Welp, I have a server that I barely use and will gladly host it for free. If anyone's interested or wants details, PM me.
koitsu wrote:
someone started massively downloading all of the content from numerous hosted sites here (nesdev, nesworld, JE in specific) using wget, which is absolutely the wrong thing to do (such utilities get stuck indefinitely on forums/boards).
Would it be less wrong to download only viewtopic.php, with topics in increasing order, and step through the 9,000 or so t= numbers (and the following pages)? I think I have enough Python-fu to scrape NESdev BBS 1.0 (wwwThreads) and NESdev BBS 2.0 (phpBB 2 based) intelligently and turn them into a usable archive.
EDIT:
koitsu gave me the thumbs up in the other topic
Well. There is one thing to say, and it is the fact that I will miss Parodius and NESDEV (if not rehosted and also having old threads archived). I had great help here, But will be very missed
I hope whoever takes up the hosting duties will be competent enough to take care of backups, etc.
Dwedit wrote:
TCRF only successfully loads about 45% of the time, no hosting from their host, please.
This is still an issue on your end. While the site is slow for others (what do you expect? It kind of outgrew the original space...) it doesn't have nearly the kind of issues that you have.
...
But to expand on what Drag said, TCRF uses a VPS outside of the place the other web hosting goes. If I ended up hosting it it'd be alongside the other sites on my DH account (rustedlogic.net, xkeeper.net, dreamandfriends.com, etc). So basically it's the same thing you suggested, piggybacking onto someone's DH account.
(Before anybody asks, I would not take any role in the site other than emergency maintenance in the event something happened server-side that needs to be fixed immediately. I have pretty much no stake or care in how these forums are run, other than the fact that I and a few others find it to be a useful resource of knowledge from time to time.)
It makes no difference what is decided, and since there are a little over 5 months left before the hosting ends you have a lot of time to consider your choices.
How many GB/mo do the BBS and wiki do on average, so that someone with more hosting experience than I have can see how much of a server to get?
Parodius going down? That's sad, but I belive you have your reasons.
koitsu wrote:
Edit: Heh, shortly after the announcement, someone started massively downloading all of the content from numerous hosted sites here (nesdev, nesworld, JE in specific) using wget, which is absolutely the wrong thing to do (such utilities get stuck indefinitely on forums/boards). I just had to firewall them off. Some people...
Why would someone do such a thing?
Drag wrote:
Dwedit wrote:
So what's next? Piggyback nesdev onto some random person's Dreamhost account?
You could always give Xkeeper a ring. We tend to dabble in
dorky video game stuff anyway.
The guy(s) from NintendoAGE may be interested in hosting the forum as well. Anybody know Dain and want to give him a poke about this?
Problem with that is that I recall them already having some cost issues awhile back...so I'm not sure if they can take on nesdev on top of it all.
Or we can just use the brewery for a temp. meet up spot, heh.
For a temporary meet up? sure. permanent. No
Glad I randomly decided to stop by, I visit pretty infrequently.
Sad news, but as others have said it's not the end of the world.
It's just that this place was such a haven for NES development for so many years...feels like home. I could always count on Nesdev to be here, talking about detailed techniques to use on ancient hardware.
I'll miss it, even when it gets reborn.
thefox wrote:
Just writing this as a reminder here (to myself and others) that the stuff from
http://blargg.parodius.com needs to be saved (I doubt blargg will be around to do it).
I appreciate your consideration. I just put up a top-level
index so you can at least mirror everything except temp/. I need to go through temp to remove anything that was meant for particular people only.
You can get a years hosting for $100 that will allow enough traffic for this site. Im sure they can scrape enough in donations for that.
Tormenter wrote:
You can get a years hosting for $100 that will allow enough traffic for this site. Im sure they can scrape enough in donations for that.
This is making the assumption that the reason is monetary, and since it's probably not (otherwise he would've made his reasons clear) I don't think it's worth trying to talk him out of it. It's ok, it seems a half dozen possible solutions are already floating around.
Tormenter wrote:
You can get a years hosting for $100 that will allow enough traffic for this site. Im sure they can scrape enough in donations for that.
I think in your case it would help if I posted a full summary of the complexities involved in doing what I/we do. I'm still doing that write-up (it's up to about 10KBytes at this time), but I'll give you a little more monetarily-focused explanation.
I say all of this knowing that your above paragraph said, quote, "for this site". I'm not sure you know how much bandwidth/month this site uses, so I'll disclose that at the end.
We actually rent co-location (datacenter) 24U worth of rack space, and I personally own all the hardware in that rack. Switches, power management units, console redirection devices, all the servers themselves and all their components, etc.. The total cost of all the equipment comes to around US$15,000.
Our monthly cost (for rack space, bandwidth, etc.) is $775/month. My portion/cost of that (once excluding the dedicated server/business folks we have, who have their own boxes) comes to $650/month. This doesn't include things like general liability insurance (that's another $450/year), general upkeep (disk replacements), contracting fees (for people who I pay to assist when doing work in the datacenter), domain renewals, etc..
Finally, for the record: we get around $30/year, at most, in donations. Most of the time it's $20 one year, then a couple years will go by with nothing. I concluded long ago that Internet visitors in general are already having difficulty making ends meet (for themselves), thus they cannot afford such. Also, you have to remember that if you *rely* on donations to pay the bills, then they aren't really donations, are they? Those are more like "service fees", which isn't the kind of operation I run.
Could I have moved everything off to some hosting provider elsewhere for cheaper? Not easily. Each of our servers is physical/dedicated, rather than under a VM/hypervisor, so resources aren't shared (per se). The cheap hosting providers you see usually use VMs/HVs or offer things like a VPS. Dedicated servers (meaning you rent a physical box in a datacenter for your own use and nobody else shares it) are more like $150-200/month. Considering that we have 8 servers, well, you can do the math. :-)
As for nesdev's bandwidth -- this is what I sent Banshaku. Keep in mind when it comes to network traffic, kilo = 1000, not 1024.
Quote:
nesdev.com (nesdev.com) -- not the Wiki part: The site takes up about 128kbit/sec worth of bandwidth (average). 128 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 = 331776000 kbits per month. That comes out to about 42GBytes/month average.
nesdev wiki (wiki.nesdev.com): The site takes up about 56kbit/sec worth of bandwidth (average). 56 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 = 145152000 kbits per month. That comes out to about 19GBytes/month average.
About disk space:
nesdev.com (nesdev.com) -- not the Wiki part -- takes up about 92MBytes of disk for just the website/data. The MySQL DB takes up 164MBytes of disk.
nesdev wiki (wiki.nesdev.com) -- takes up about 190MBytes of disk just for the website/data. The MySQL DB takes up 78MBytes of disk.
You'll find lots of hosting providers do a very clever thing -- they either offer you lots of traffic/month but very little disk space, OR, lots of disk space but very little traffic/month. They do this to keep people from getting hosting and using it as a large repository for large files (movies, music, etc.), since bandwidth is expensive. We don't operate this way. Disk is disk, network is network. Disk space is cheap, network traffic isn't.
Ah. I think when I hosted TASVideos, the bandwidth peaked somewhere around 60 GB / month according to Webalizer logs, with an average around 40 GB / month. Plus added to that a BitTorrent seeder. Right now, with TASVideos removed, I get between 6 and 15 GB / month (which is surprisingly much, considering I only have a personal site and a
Japanese dictionary right now).
I have no transmission quota; only an uplink bandwidth limit that is around 100 KiB/s, still about 10 times more than required for NESDev by average. (This ISP provides good downloads, but crappy uploads.)
I have no disk space problems for hosting either. So according to those specifications, I could well host NESDev wiki and forums for a while. But I would really need to virtual-machine it, because I don't want to give admins and/or code of possibly unknown nature access to my private files.
koitsu wrote:
Our monthly cost (for rack space, bandwidth, etc.) is $775/month. My portion/cost of that (once excluding the dedicated server/business folks we have, who have their own boxes) comes to $650/month. This doesn't include things like general liability insurance (that's another $450/year), general upkeep (disk replacements), contracting fees (for people who I pay to assist when doing work in the datacenter), domain renewals, etc..
Wow I never realized the reality of this situation. We all owe you a great amount of gratitude for footing our bill over the years. I know may have said it, but THANK YOU koitsu! I don't know if we'll ever be able to return that large of a favor.
I don't think it's really fair for a single/few people to be solely financially responsible for our costs. There are lots of ways that we can improve upon the $20 annual income of nesdev responsibly. Should we start another discussion over ideas of how we might go about this that we can agree upon formally?
If I'd known it was that expensive (maybe I just need to pay more attention!) I'd have chipped in more than a few times already.
infiniteneslives wrote:
I don't think it's really fair for a single/few people to be solely financially responsible for our costs.
I guess I see it slightly differently (I don't mean this in an argumentative or combative way, BTW). If I didn't want to be doing the free hosting thing, I wouldn't be doing it. That's one of the complexities that I had to figure out in my head over the past 6 months or so. "Hobby vs. business" so-to-speak.
I don't have any problem with spending money on a hobby -- and I considered the hosting thing a hobby for many years -- but it's gotten to the point where financially it's just not feasible. But finances aren't the only reason. I guess that's why I'm writing up a very large summary explaining all the reasons (there are 4 or 5 main ones). Parodius as a whole (not specific to nesdev) has gone from a hobby to a chore/task. And the dedicated customers (on their own boxes) are a completely separate debacle which I'm not even going to get into here...
What I'm trying to say is that my disclosure of how much our monthly costs are isn't me trying to ask for help -- I work a full-time job (well, until May... that's a separate and much more personal topic though) and thus can afford the co-lo costs. You gotta remember that that's $650/month that covers, well, everything -- and all the sites we host (not just nesdev!).
Could I take everything hosted here, shove it on to a $200/month dedicated server somewhere (vs. doing native co-lo), and accomplish the same? Yes. However, I'd probably lose OOB (out-of-band, meaning need for native VGA or serial console which I can access remotely), lose resiliency (nightly backups done in an efficient manner, stored on a dedicated + secure box), lose distribution of services (MySQL is on one box, web is on another, etc.), yadda yadda. That dedicated box would also have only 1 disk, while all of the Parodius hosting servers have 4 (1 OS disk + 3 in raidz (think RAID-5) for everyone's data). If I was just hosting one or two sites for fun and didn't care about Doing Things Right(tm), sure, that'd work. But I tend to apply what I've learned as a UNIX SA over the years to, well, a lot of things. :-) Thus it becomes more expensive.
infiniteneslives wrote:
There are lots of ways that we can improve upon the $20 annual income of nesdev responsibly. Should we start another discussion over ideas of how we might go about this that we can agree upon formally?
If you guys want to discuss that with regards to whoever ends up taking over things (i.e. new hosting provider), that's cool. Maybe something can be reached where multiple people chipping in small amounts per month can result in the thing paying for itself. But my decision at this point, with regards to Parodius, is final.
The problem with the paying for itself thing is "what happens if we fall short" In the end to keep running that means someone has to foot the bill.
Now considering we only have nesdev + the wiki to host...our costs I assume can be considerably lower. Which is a big plus I suppose.
koitsu wrote:
infiniteneslives wrote:
I don't think it's really fair for a single/few people to be solely financially responsible for our costs.
I guess I see it slightly differently (I don't mean this in an argumentative or combative way, BTW). If I didn't want to be doing the free hosting thing, I wouldn't be doing it. That's one of the complexities that I had to figure out in my head over the past 6 months or so. "Hobby vs. business" so-to-speak.
No I understand what your saying and can see why you've chosen to take this on in the past. I just took for granted what you were doing for us and it sounds like others were as well. I don't want to hold back someone who wants to contribute on a similar level as yourself. But I'm not going to assume that someone will. So I think there are a few people (including myself) who could find ways to contribute financially that we haven't previously considered.
Quote:
But my decision at this point, with regards to Parodius, is final.
I COMPLETELY understand that and didn't mean to sound like we might be able to change your mind or anything. I was only speaking from a stand point for our future plans. But our future plans probably belong in another topic.
Go Daddy is offering an "Economy 4GH" package, which includes 10 GB of space, 10 MySQL databases (1 GB each), and unmetered bandwidth, for about $60 per year. There's also a plan that adds unmetered space (limited to half a million files) and SSL support (one domain-validated certificate and one IPv4 address) for twice that.
So we're looking at about 60 GB/mo of bandwidth, a couple hundred MB of static disk space, and well below 1 GB of MySQL. If it's just a file repository, a board, a couple static archived boards, and a wiki, then it'd probably fit on such a shared hosting account on DH/GD.
No referral URL because my only conflict of interest is that my employer uses Go Daddy hosting.
tepples wrote:
Go Daddy
NO.
Get a REAL HOST.
Edit: Okay, considering the amount of programming content hosted here, the last thing this site needs is for whoever hosts it to wipe it at the first sign of trouble.
I'm still offering to host it on my DreamHost account (for free*). I've been using it for about 4 years for various projects (including very high-bandwidth areas) and... no real issues.
(This offer sort of extends to a few other parodius things depending. Things like sl1me/blargg's domain, etc. I have no issues hosting them, as I do for BMF's old rustedmagick.com site.)
*I like to try to charge people $10 for real domain names (the cost to me to register/maintain them), but generally I can be coerced into giving it out for free. Otherwise, nobody really pays for their hosting.
...to add something since there seems to be a lot of discussion elsewhere of how to move things:
- a tarball of the site files. (This is easy enough if it's stored sanely.)
- mysqldump of databases (compressed)
From there it's just extracting and changing the auth information and possibly the root paths if they're used. Trivial and a lot easier to do than scraping every page of the site (!).
@Xkeeper
thank you for the offer, I will keep it in mind regarding the wiki.
But first, we need to wait for Memblers to manifest himself regarding his intention about the BBS. Since he seems to have access to some private hosting, he may decide to use this if the requirements are good enough.
Let wait for him to give his opinion before moving forward too fast: we should be proactive, not reactive.
Well nothing lasts forever, but going by archive.org, it's been maybe 12 years this month since NESdev moved here from Geocities. The Parodius server has been amazingly good, as far as fast response and reliability. So in those respects it's probably all downhill from here, but I'm sure we'll survive with the site being a little slower.
I didn't know it was so expensive for everything, I knew it wasn't cheap, but wow. Through bluehost, I have access to a cheap (shared) server that I pay for to use with my online store (still "coming soon"), wish I would have donated more instead of paying for that (and hardly using it so far), but seems like it would barely put a dent in the total cost. Thanks for keeping it running all this time, koitsu. And of course for setting up the forums, I still remember asking for help with that. And back when I felt I had to reply to every single post because there weren't any users, heheh.
So, I think it wouldn't be too difficult to move it to this onto cheap hosting for now, but how bad could it be? I'm already paid up for another 18 months or whatever, and there are no space/bandwidth limits (well, TOS says no more than 1000 tables in an SQL file, sounds like a lot right?) - I guess it just gets throttled if it uses too many resources. If it ends up not working for us, maybe we can move do a dedicated server later on. I wouldn't want to pay $100 a month by myself, but I'm sure something could be figured out if needed.
I have a server currently co-located that could house nesdev.com. It would be shared with some hosted videos for a while... but bandwidth shouldn't be a problem and i could move it to its own 1u server in the near futur
The
Konfiskated Teknologies Network (kontek.net) would like to extend an offer of free hosting to any affected sites. We previously handled the relocation of many IGN hosted sites as they shut down, and would gladly take on some more.
E-mail me at
eclipsedmoon@gmail.com for any inquiries, or use any of the IM screen names linked to my account here.
Now we have targeted spam(?)! cool!...
I would like to make an addendum to my previous posts and say that if I get a tar.gz of the site's files and database, I can have a copy of this thing running in no time flat, for free, for a long time. (We are paid up on hosting bills for a long time and have funds in our account that will last longer).
(I also have BMF54123 hosted on my account, and I don't think he would let anything happen either, haha.)
Quote:
*181230 <@Drag> Well, nesdev is a funny place
*181235 <@Drag> You basically need to go in and say
*181244 <@Drag> "Ok guys, I'm /going/ to host you"
*181255 <@Drag> otherwise, they'll just discuss it endlessly without coming to a consensus
I agree with this. The talk of archiving everything and starting over is seen as a universally terrible idea from my side, and I figure that getting things moved over sooner rather than waiting means that fears over the future can be laid to rest. (Though it wouldn't hurt to build an archive afterwards.)
Banshaku wrote:
Now we have targeted spam(?)! cool!...
Heh, I was afraid it would come off like that. Just because I have never felt a need to post before doesn't mean I haven't been reading for a long time. Just thought we could provide a service.
Since you answered my "bait" then at the least we know is not just some random spam
Since we have a lot of spam, I had to see what would be you answer. Sorry about that.
Thank you for the offer, we will consider it.
Banshaku wrote:
Since you answered my "bait" then at the least we know is not just some random spam
Since we have a lot of spam, I had to see what would be you answer. Sorry about that.
Thank you for the offer, we will consider it.
No problem, spam's a pain for us all.
Xkeeper wrote:
I would like to make an addendum to my previous posts and say that if I get a tar.gz of the site's files and database, I can have a copy of this thing running in no time flat, for free, for a long time. (We are paid up on hosting bills for a long time and have funds in our account that will last longer).
(I also have BMF54123 hosted on my account, and I don't think he would let anything happen either, haha.)
Quote:
*181230 <@Drag> Well, nesdev is a funny place
*181235 <@Drag> You basically need to go in and say
*181244 <@Drag> "Ok guys, I'm /going/ to host you"
*181255 <@Drag> otherwise, they'll just discuss it endlessly without coming to a consensus
I agree with this. The talk of archiving everything and starting over is seen as a universally terrible idea from my side, and I figure that getting things moved over sooner rather than waiting means that fears over the future can be laid to rest. (Though it wouldn't hurt to build an archive afterwards.)
I have no real stance on the matter; I'm leaving the decisions here up to the other moderators, including Memblers, and the general community. If everyone signs off on it, then we'll lock the board down and I'll be happy to provide a tarball of the site + mysqldump of the existing DB. I will redirect URLs / point DNS A records wherever they need to go per folks' requests. Rest assured you'll get no push-back from me. :-)
Three things to keep in mind if you do end up hosting this:
1. File/directory permissions. We use the
Apache 2 ITK MPM, where httpd changes its uid/gid before doing any kind of exec or file I/O. Thus stupid things like "chmod {666,777}" are a thing of the past. There's really no other way to run a multi-user-safe Apache instance. suexec/cgiwrap don't cut it. So just keep in mind that some manual chmods may be required.
2. The forum software is, as I understand it, a bit modified to work with UTF-8. Quietust, if I remember right, did a lot of this work. So if someone considers upgrading the board, well, keep that in mind.
3. Configuration files for the board, etc. need to be changed to refer to a completely new base URL for cookies + server-side-sessions. Please don't keep them referring to nesdev.com. I forget where this is within the config file, but worth pointing out / reminding folks of anyway.
Eclipsed Moon wrote:
The
Konfiskated Teknologies Network (kontek.net) would like to extend an offer of free hosting to any affected sites. We previously handled the relocation of many IGN hosted sites as they shut down, and would gladly take on some more.
E-mail me at
eclipsedmoon@gmail.com for any inquiries, or use any of the IM screen names linked to my account here.
...
I might take you up on that. Expect an email in a while.
I just want to take the opportunity to thank koitsu for being as generous as he has been with NesDev. I've not posted here a ton, but this place has been one of my daily reads for quite some time now, and even having no NES programming experience I know more about the system now than I did before I ever visited the site/forums. I also want to thank the forum staff for helping keep this place clean. I know that the days of NesDev aren't over, but I like to think of it as the ending of one era and the beginning of another.
Here's to years and years of future NesDev goodness.
Good luck in your future endeavors, koitsu!
I second that. Thanks for the great hosting. It's too bad it must come to an end. Hopefully everyone including you will be coming to nesdev's eventual new home, where ever that may be.
Oh, of course. I'm not gonna give up one any of my daily reads just because they change hosting
Just curious, has there been any decision as far as hosting? My offer still stands for hosting nesdev and related.
Also, regardless of where it ends up being hosted, I would like to volunteer my services for a homepage redesign & cleanup.
WhoaMan, I meant to call you the other night but was a little busy (I would now, but I'm at work). Your offer seems like the best one so far, I'll try to contact you soon so we can figure out the details.
hehe, I was just curious since I had not heard anything about hosting for a few days. Like I mentioned in the PM, you can also get in touch by email or PM if it is easier.
I feel very sad, like when people have to pack up and move.
But sometimes when there are endings there are also beginnings.
Ponder on this, everyone, if you will.
:-/
I hope that you guys can figure something out and yes it seems like there is enough time as long as an agreement is made. I also have a suggestion.
I think the forum and the wiki is going to be more difficult to to find a place and move it. If no consensus can be made about it. I do suggest to at least move the main site to another server. I assume that the forum and wiki consumes the most bandwidth.
Also remove some of the backup downloads as well as writing some htaccess scripts to block hotlinking (if there isn't already one in place here). That should cut the bandwidth consumption down some. That's what I have done with my own website.
Anything to be done to cut bandwidth usage at a new place since I doubt that many places would offer as much bandwidth.
Just a suggestion! But consider it.
To koitsu:
I hope that you consider staying with the community whatever may happen in the future. It seems like to me that you have contributed so much to NESdev, not to mention the translation hacking community, providing ad-free webspace to many people for a very long time. As well as your other contributions over the years. It's beyond price and very much appreciated!
I can say that I will remember everything that you've done for the community. Thank you!
koitsu wrote:
Edit: Heh, shortly after the announcement, someone started massively downloading all of the content from numerous hosted sites here (nesdev, nesworld, JE in specific) using wget, which is absolutely the wrong thing to do (such utilities get stuck indefinitely on forums/boards). I just had to firewall them off. Some people...
Would it be possible to get some torrents going for each site?
I can't speak for other sites, but as for NESdev, be patient. I'll soon make zipfiles of HTML pages of the old forum, current forum, and wiki available when they're done. Is
nesdev_weekly.zip up to date?
NESWORLD has already moved to another server and the nameservers for the domain are changed as well and the new changes are being spread around the world...
So no need to waste Parodius' bandwidth.
Does anyone have any plans for all content on nesdev (not the forum or wiki)?
tepples wrote:
I can't speak for other sites, but as for NESdev, be patient. I'll soon make zipfiles of HTML pages of the old forum, current forum, and wiki available when they're done. Is
nesdev_weekly.zip up to date?
Yup, it's generated every Sunday at 00:00 PT like usual. :-)
oRBIT2002 wrote:
Does anyone have any plans for all content on nesdev (not the forum or wiki)?
I'm sure that will be moving with the rest of the site. It'll involve some work on Memblers' part, since right now (and since the beginning of time, hehe) the nesdev site (and bbs) have resided under a directory in his personal account.
koitsu wrote:
tepples wrote:
Yup, it's generated every Sunday at 00:00 PT like usual.
Thanks. That means I have a complete copy of all information on the site, except for new phpBB posts from the past week, on my laptop. Come August, as the final days approach, I'm 99.44% confident that nothing of value will be lost.
Koitsu and Tepples,
Thank you for being diligent about preserving our history and all of the prior work that you've done to keep nesdev humming along. As a fellow Unix sys-admin, I very much appreciate the complexity of the task, both technically and ethically. You both have my appreciation.
ps- AM I leaving anyone out? Who else is/was an "admin" of sorts, keeping the riff-raff out, hacking the php code, etc..?
Memblers wrote:
WhoaMan, I meant to call you the other night but was a little busy (I would now, but I'm at work). Your offer seems like the best one so far, I'll try to contact you soon so we can figure out the details.
So, any progress? I think it would be best to move the forum sooner rather than later so that we'll have plenty of time to make sure the new host runs reliably, etc.
clueless wrote:
ps- AM I leaving anyone out? Who else is/was an "admin" of sorts, keeping the riff-raff out, hacking the php code, etc..?
Other folks you might have forgotten ( :-) ):
- Quietust, who did some UTF-8/Unicode hackery on the board (either phpBB or wwwThreads, can't remember which but I think the former), to make it Unicode-compliant rather than mess about with per-language encodings. Again, if I remember right, this is how/why the Chinese and Japanese forums here actually work.
- Banshaku, who helps out here quite a bit and is also one of the official maintainers of the Wiki. He does most of the Wiki administrative work too, including via shell.
I'm certain I'm forgetting someone, I just can't remember who. Argh.
Kasumi wrote:
Memblers?
That guy never did anything to begin with! ;) ;)
I was not very active for the wiki recently because of my current schedule is hell so Koitsu helped me a lot for the maintenance. Thank you again.
I will need to find some time when the new server is official though. That is why I decided from the start that there should be more than one admin for the wiki "just in case" of the admin become less available. So it did pay off.
I'm the official maintainer and this is where my role ends: I still see the wiki as owned by the community, which mean anybody can brings ideas.
I have a couple of computers that I can donate and can work as servers,
they are pemptium 4 I believe but one of them has 500GB hard drive and the other one I don't remember.
Would this be something that interest you all?
I'll be looking for this... if it survives past the Parodius closing (I think it will... just that I need to make sure to check the URLs).
Until then... Sayonara, Parodius.
This is all an unfortunate read for many I'm sure - I recall reading through nesdev for most of my middle school times years ago, and having only recently rediscovered it to find it's closing is disapointing!
I have a server lying around on a fairly beefy stable enterprise-level connection; would it be helpful at all to mirror anything off of that or use it for some form of hosting?
pichichi010: I appreciate the offer, but we should be set (I believe the server we'll move to is running a Xeon.. just total overkill, I'm sure).
mikejmoffitt: No worries man, Parodius is closing but NESdev isn't. Just means the address will be nesdev.com rather than the classic nesdev.com.
Memblers wrote:
pichichi010: I appreciate the offer, but we should be set (I believe the server we'll move to is running a Xeon.. just total overkill, I'm sure).
mikejmoffitt: No worries man, Parodius is closing but NESdev isn't. Just means the address will be nesdev.com rather than the classic nesdev.com.
Alright, good to hear. I have access to a boatload of 1U dual xeon servers if they may be of any use.
ouch, sad news. i haven't read this entire thread, but i will gladly offer to host the whole thing, including forum, on my personal server for free. nesdev has been immeasurably valuable to me, so this would just be my way of giving back. i'm sure something is probably already figured out by now, but if not my offer stands.
i can't provide a regular domain name on my own such as nesdev.com, but if a domain name is already registered somewhere else you would just have to point the domain to my server's IP, and i can configure a virtual host for it. i could also provide a free subdomain under rubbermallet.org, which i own. so, something like nesdev.rubbermallet.org
my server's line has an upstream of about 500 KB/s, which while not earth-shatteringly fast, should be overkill for everything nesdev has. the connection stability is rock-solid, and the server box is a legit actual server, designed for rack-mounting and all. (its a dual-CPU proliant, and it's been extremely reliable for me for years)
it's already set up with PHP, MySQL, etc... so it'd be basically ready-to-go. would just need to set up the virtual host, and create an FTP login for the admin.
Memblers wrote:
pichichi010: I appreciate the offer, but we should be set (I believe the server we'll move to is running a Xeon.. just total overkill, I'm sure).
It's cool seeing so many willing to offer help with hosting. This site's definitely sticking around for the long term
Big thanks to koitsu and our eventual new host.
It has been 3 months since the announcement, when are we going to move?
I completely don't understand what this topic is about. Guys wondering how to fetch the wiki's, bbs and main site.
If the webmaster is know what is going on, he would move the whole bbs into new server - just moving the database + current version of phpb.
The same goes for wiki - all the pages are stored, so what's the matter `how to move it?`
Also, if the owner of parodius wasn't such a m........r, he would sold the hosting services for someone's else who would take care about that.
The only reasons that come into my mind is
a) not enough money
b) not enough time
If the servers are too expensive to maintain, he could encourage the visitors to give a gifts or put banners.
Also - don't worry dudes and do not make backups with wgets, teleport, webstripper or some other tools. There are such fantastic sites like webarchive, where you can see how the site looked in the past - long long after parodius is down, you will be able to view all its sites
Words escape me. You obviously have no clue what is going on with Parodius, or how excellent our hosting provider has been.
clueless wrote:
Words escape me. You obviously have no clue what is going on ...
This.
I get the impression his opinion is the result of 1) not reading the initial post + the explanation of what's going on (main parodius.com news page), 2) language barrier, 3) some kind of general annoyance rather than being calm and asking questions (if there are any).
Furthermore,
I don't sell shit to anyone: period. "Selling" Parodius to some company would be the most moral-violating, horrible thing I could do to the underlying folks who we've hosted for years. That is just so wrong on so many levels that I cannot even fathom doing so. It would also mean I'd be making money off of selling off something I did for free + as a hobby, which is also wrong (to me, morally).
I just wonder why the redirect will end so early (end of October). It'll break inbound links from the rest of the web.
The reason is pretty simple: because maintaining the redirects still requires me to retain some degree of responsibility / administrative work. It's the exact same for the Email redirections. I'm absolutely 100% certain someone we've hosted will complain that some redirect "doesn't work the way they want", or "wants one thing directed one place, and another somewhere else" -- and the same with Email.
Email redirections will still affect people as a result of my choice of DNSBLs, which historically has impacted users many times over (and I've grown very tired of having to juggle anti-spam methodologies/etc. to keep a few people happy while upsetting others). I cannot tersely explain this situation. The thing I've learned is that I never should have begun offering hosted Email services. It's now become a serious hindrance.
In fact, I'm already in a fairly heated discussion with one of our users about the Email redirections; apparently "until October" isn't long enough for him. I told him "I'm willing to extend this for you until December", which also apparently isn't long enough for him. Apparently he wants the redirection for 2-3 years -- no I'm not kidding. I told him December is the cut-off point for him period, and I'm not willing to extend it any further. He's quite pissed off ("I have hundreds of places I have to change my Email address"), and as much as I can understand that, that really isn't my problem. I can't make everyone happy.
I suppose all of this would make more sense if I finished doing my write-up on why the doors are closing in the first place.
The other problem with redirections is that they allow people to be lazy. There's no incentive for someone to actually get up off their butt and fix links or update their Email addresses if things just continue working indefinitely. And if that's the case, then why even bother closing our doors at all? There has to be a point where a person says "enough is enough". Since I'm the one who has to deal with it all, that point is "the sooner the better".
koitsu wrote:
The other problem with redirections is that they allow people to be lazy.
Except Sir Tim Berners-Lee appears to think
laziness is a good thing for the web. I wonder how many different operators of other web sites one would have to contact to get inbound links corrected. Who has access to this domain's Referer data?
The moral: Always host on your own domain, not someone else's subdomain. My 20/20 hindsight tells me the redirect from nesdev.com to nesdev.com should have gone the other way.
You can't micro-manage the web, Tepples. Thus, links pointing to old URLs / sites / domains / whatever = too bad. That's just the way it works. I say this with respect, not condescension: getting OCD over it isn't worth it. Besides, if a link doesn't work, people usually resort to a search engine to try and find what they're looking for. I know if someone mailed me about a link I had on my home page which pointed to something outdated I'd actually be a little creeped out. And of course I've yet to encounter anyone who has talked to me about my very old, original domain name crystalis.com (I think Neill Corlett may be the only one old enough to remember that).
When the site is moved, I can provide Memblers (or whomever else as part of the "staff") full webalizer data which ranges from August 2011 to present (compiled daily, but webalizer stats are organised monthly). I believe historic referer data is available through that.
We don't keep more than 14 days of Apache access and error logs -- we simply host too many sites to retain more than that.
@Koitsu:
I cannot believe how people can complain when they "freeloaded" that service until now... People should be ashamed of that, I don't know what to say.
The rules have been decided, the dices have rolled, now everyone keep your mouth shut and accept that we have to move forward
It just a damn fan website: we can figure out what doesn't work later and nobody will die from that.
The most important part is that content of the site is still intact, the rest is just icing.
@Banshaku:
Quote:
I cannot believe how people can complain when they "freeloaded" that service until now... People should be ashamed of that, I don't know what to say.
Welcome to one of the many (and I do stress the word *many*) reasons why I'm closing things down. I don't have a problem with people expecting good service or reliability (that's fine -- I too expect such, free or commercial, because it's really not that hard to accomplish), but given that everything is a hobby it does amaze me a bit that some people had this strange assumption that I would just keep doing this thing indefinitely until the day I die. Which makes me wonder as well -- what would people have done if, say, one day I got hit by a bus? *shakes head* It amazes me sometimes that people don't take responsibility for their own stuff and instead would rather just pawn it off onto someone else.
If someone really wanted to keep the redirection up that much longer, they'd offer to pay enough to make it worthwhile. Screw the haters and freeloaders, the people who actually matter are grateful that you've ran things this long (and are offering to redirect at all, you could just say "tough shit, I'm going down on X date with no redirects, it's my hosting and I'll do what I want"). That's a sign of character, that you're even willing to extend it as long as you are.
Thanks for the kind words, folks.
HTTP redirections are extremely low-bandwidth and incredibly simple to maintain, so I'm actually going to be extending those until December 2012. (I'll be updating the Parodius home page momentarily to reflect that)
Email redirections are also simple to maintain, but can be high bandwidth depending on what someone sends (e.g. Emailing an ISO image would take up twice the amount of my bandwidth -- once to receive it, and once more to forward it on to another host), and are susceptible to my own DNSBL/RBL rules that I choose to use.
The box being used for redirections is my own personal box, which means the SMTP server running on there is configured to my and ONLY MY liking. The DNSBL/RBLs I use there are significantly more strict than the ones I use on Parodius presently, simply because the only person using the box is me (and that's how I want to keep it).
A historic problem I've dealt with for 5-6 years now (at least), with regards to a hosting service (e.g. multi-user systems), is juggling anti-spam tactics. A solution might solve problems for one user, but induces problems for another. This has happened 40 or 50 times -- no exaggeration -- and there is very little one can do about it while keeping the KISS principle in mind. There are ways to solve it, but it involves a lot of resources (basically a single SMTP server/daemon for each user, thus they can control their own DNSBL/RBLs, as well as an instance of SpamAssassin per user) and is extremely annoying/complex to maintain. So like I said earlier, providing Email services is something I regret ever doing, because it's just a complete and total nightmare. Plus there are lots of free services (like Gmail) who do a much better job and give you a decent amount of control over your spam rules. Though I personally wouldn't trust storing all of my Email on Google or Microsoft (Hotmail)'s servers, they're still both good services for POP/IMAP where you download your messages periodically and delete them from the server.
Both of these things -- HTTP redirections and Email redirections -- still cause me to have to provide some degree of support, which is another part I'd really rather not be doing. If you ask me "So then why are you?", the answer is: because I'm a nice guy, and I really hate it when I see companies/providers/etc. simply shut down and leave everyone in the dust w/out a care in the world. Again, morally that just isn't how I operate.
Sorry, rambling a bit there, but maybe that gives more insight to some things.
Thought people might enjoy this in some way or another. It's basically the results of my Parodius decommissioning work in the datacenter/co-lo this evening. What you see is all our hardware that we used, as well as me rambling a bit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_C1gkPeJDcEnjoy.
It was interesting to hear the voice behind parodius since it gave some image about who was in charge. I felt sad a little bit knowing that it's over though.
Strange how interesting that was. I guess it's just that nesdev/parodius as always just been. It's easy to take for granted the hardware that has kept it alive so I enjoyed finally 'seeing' it. Thanks for sharing!
oi, seems so strange that parodius is down. thanks again for the years of service you offered to everyone
It was interesting to see what Nesdev-parodius was "in the real world".
By the way it's strange this place is not nesdev-parodius any longer, as I continue to think it's nesedev-parodius even though parodius is no longer