Crash

I'm excited to announce that we're back up and things are as they were before the storm that struck us on the eve of Assembly 2010. The issues with the email sending have been solved and the web front-end is moving forwards. All this in mind, I'd like to welcome all the new users that have been waiting at the shore for the past two weeks (we're working on a solution to send an invitation mail to all who registered during this time right now).

As we move out of the low waters, I'd now like to invite you all to discuss about the future features of Renderfarm.fi. An example of an ongoing development discussion is the idea of using a video hosting service such as Youtube or Vimeo to host the encoded videos. What do you think about this topic?

Thursday morning we experienced a meltdown of the scale that we've never experienced before. Nice timing too! I'd just picked up Janus Kristensen and Kalle Max Hofmann from the airport when I heard the news. First I was hopeful, then melancholic, then angry at myself for not backing everything up, then again hopeful, melancholic .. well you get the idea. It's almost like this nice video of a Finnish drinking evening (by "those awful Swedes" ;-).

Basically what happened was that because of the huge sessions that we'd been taking on, we actually ran out of diskspace on the server, which in combination with a screaming database caused the meltdown. Actually we'd done this before, but recovered without any serious side-effects - which probably led me into believing that it's not that big of an issue. Well, lesson learned for yours truly. Couple this with the fact that backups are quite non-existent at the moment (another thing that's getting "a bit" more attention from now on) and you have a major screw up in your hands.

Anyway now it seems that not all is lost.  Although we haven't still turned on the back-end, the UI (basically Drupal) seems to be nearly back in shape. We will try to get the BOINC side up and running as soon as possible. Meanwhile, here's us at our fantastically helpful ISP Otaverkko, who went out of their way to help us. This is us on at their main server hall, wondering what's up with our fantastic Dell Edge server (picture of that coming up later).

PS. Apart from all this, unnecessary hassle Assembly is looking good and all the whole Blender.fi community is having a blast. More about this later when we have the time.