Dimensions Online server update...
Thursday, July 23, 10am PST -- Slowly we're exorcising the bugs from the new server. The boards seem to be pretty stable, the shopping cart is back, and so is the site subscription feature. Setting up a Unix server for optimal web serving performance is a hugely complicated task! We've been trying out different settings and the site seems to be getting much faster.
Also, by now you've probably noticed that we finally gave Dimensions Online its own domain, www.dimensionsmagazine.com (dimensionsonline was taken).
Monday, July 20, 4pm PST -- The server has been up and down all day as we tried to fix some of the performance bottlenecks. The sys admin did all sorts of wizardry on our configuration scripts (and I thought I knew a bit about UNIX -- not) and the machine is now considerably faster. I decided to also put in another 64MB of RAM which'll bring us up to 160MB (I know, I know, doesn't have enough money to buy the models a cheesburger, but enough to buy fancy RAM chips...) and we should have a very solid machine.
Monday, July 20, 9am PST -- We've had a bit of a rough weekend. After a series of 110+ degree days in the Sacramento area, we experienced a few brief power outages due to all those airconditioners humming. Unfortunately, the new server wasn't on an uninterruptible power supply and when we lost power the machine didn't come back up automatically. I came in Sunday evening and connected it to an uninterruptible power source. We also made some additional changes. The server has been very sluggish since and we're trying to find out why.
Friday, July 17 -- The boards are back, hopefully. The sys admin put in some extra hours last night and moved all of our files onto our own server. As a result, there may/will be some problems and bugs to sort out. Please email me with whatever bugs you discover.
By the way, here's a picture of the new home of Dimensions Online. What you see here are two Apple Network Server 500 machines sitting in my office. The one to the left houses the data for all of our magazines. The one on the right is used exclusively as a web server for Dimensions Online, our two other magazines, and the NAAFA website.
PS: we named the machines "Castor" and "Pollux."
