As you all know BlackAdder4 suffered a hardware failure last Thursday morning. Gandalf & Oldbloke visited the rack on Saturday and pulled BA4 out of the rack (along with our NAS) and took them away for further investigation after BA4 refused to boot up and remain stable. Oldie's testing points at the PSU and we have bought replacements which are en route. Once installed and retested we'll be looking to bring BA4 back into service, but probably in a different role.
The bottom line is that BA4 is over 5 years old now so the chances of further hardware failures is much higher than with a new box. Council's view is that irrespective of whether BA4 can be repaired it is now time to replace BA4, so in the mean time the plan should be:
-forums restored from backups and moved to run on a virtual private server (this provides us with much higher resilience and removes BA4 as a single point of failure) - ALREADY DONE
-BA4 temporarily reinstalled to the data-centre (if the repair works) to allow game servers & TS to be run (the TS is currently being run on my fibre) - DONE
-in the mean time BlackAdder5 is to be purchased (being specced and investigated) - DONE
-BA5 will replace BA4 in the data-centre as soon as feasible and will take over as our main game server - IN PROGRESS
-BA4 (assuming the repair was successful) is to move into a backup role only - WILL HAPPEN ONCE BA5 HAS BEEN COMMISSIONED
From our research so far a budget of about £1,500 - £2,000 should allow us to purchase an appropriate server with lights out management, additional RAM and disks. We currently have about £1,500 in the dMw bank account but need to keep £500 of this to meet month to month costs, so we need to raise some additional funds. (we consider a hardware purchase is still the best route for us - BA4 cost us £1,710 five years ago, a monthly equivalent of £28.50 which is pretty stunning value!). All being well, we hope to order BA5 this week.
What Can You Do?
You can become a Supporting Member (£12 per annum) or donate to the dMw Bank Account to help us raise sufficient funds to cover the purchase of the new server. We've got a lot of money in the dMw Bank Account, but not quite enough to buy the server and keep £500 or so in the bank to meet ongoing costs, so we need your help to close the gap.
If you feel able to make a donation towards the server fund then please as a primary option, become a dMw Supporting Member. If you want to donate more than this then please do so. Donations and Supporting Member subscriptions are available via this webpage:
DONATE HERE
http://www.deadmen.co.uk/forum/content.php?194-Donate
If you want to avoid us paying Paypal charges for the receipt of your donation then please make a direct transfer into the dMw bank account, the details of which are on the above link.
We hope that this brings you up to speed with what has gone on over the past few days and on behalf of us all I'd like to thank those involved for their time and assistance in getting this resolved.
Apologies for the down time, but we're back up for now and will bring game servers online again as soon as possible.
On behalf of the dMw Council, thank you for your ongoing support of the dMw community!
Note: if you make a direct transfer to the bank *and* you want Supporting Member status then you will need to send a PM to Penfold providing details of the transfer as it will need to be added manually (Supporting Member subscriptions via Paypal are automated).
Direct bank transfers received (excluding Supporting Member subscriptions):
£ 50.00
£100.00
£ 30.00
£ 50.00
£ 30.00
£ 50.00
£ 30.00
£ 30.00
£300.00
Paypal donations received:
£ 25.00
£ 25.00
£ 30.00
£ 25.00
£ 15.00
£ 20.00
£ 50.00
£ 25.00
£ 50.00
£ 10.00
Thank you!
After Jesus' birthday, ill sign up to become a supporter :)
Bank account looks a little worse for wear right now lol
Is it just my phone or does tapatalk redirect that donate link to an old post about PS Tony Hawk pro 2 for every one?
Sent from my C6903 using Tapatalk
Link works when I click it on my PC, when I click it on Tapatalk it takes me to the incorrect thread. Wait till you get home Mirianna, sorry! (error reported to Gandalf for investigation).
Donated.
I'm still waiting to hear back from my IBM contact regarding servers.
Never trust a salesman -_-
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Updated, thank you all!
done :D
I'll do another next month.
Added something to the Lloyds account..
Cheers,
Bert
And there you have a small x-mas present for DMW from me :)
Done!!!
Me too.
Some additional funds added and will see if I can spare some more once pay comes through end of next week.
Thank you all! We hope to purchase BA5 this week, we'll let everyone know once a final decision is made.
:thumbsup:
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Donated something also. HTH
Donated and paid subs early.
On behalf of the whole community can I thank everyone who is contributing so generously to the sever fund.
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As I am playing on a regular basis on the dMw bf4 server, I decided to become a supporting member also. So I donated too :)
It's about time! Here.. Have some tags...
just did me yearly subs and donated some more as well