Amalla is Online, Motoko will be offline by, well soon.

Server Status: Amalla Up, Motoko Up (but not for much longer), Lumpy Up

Server Notes
The changeover has been completed. Services will continue uninterrupted (Except for you oni. Deal with it ^.~) Motoko will soon be going offline so please be sure to switch to the Ventrilo server on ventrilo.nqig.net. (This name will be mapped to whatever server is hosting ventrilo from now on.) Nothing else needs to be changed to continue using Ventrilo.

If you notice a feature that is missing please inform me and I will make every effort to bring it on to the new server. Also note that there was a 1 day period where mailboxes became disjunct. If you're worried that you may have lost an e-mail, contact me and I'll give you a copy of your mailbox that was made shortly after the disjunction was repaired.

Unlike all the times in the past, your passwords have NOT been reset. This was accomplished by me bopping myself in the head and just copying your password hashes over to the new server. They're not as strong as the server's native password hashes (Amalla natively uses MD5 hashes and Motoko used libcrypt hashes,) but if I've done my job right there shouldn't be much of a difference in security.

The swap to the new provider was much easier than I had expected. There where a few minor glitches associated with having two fully functional servers online at once (and having two very different impressions of the domain settings, (Jim's Lesson Learned: Don't forget to update the serial number on your zone records when you change them)) but overall things went rather smoothly (MUCH more smoothly then they have gone in the past, but this may also itself be related to the fact that Motoko was kept online during the switchover so I could copy files as I needed them.)

All in all I'm happy with the switch. Go Daddy's server seems to run pretty well (though it does ocassionally chug a bit) and it DEFINATELY shows the value of the Virtual Server concept.

Maybe one day when I get the chance I'll add Virtual Server hosting to my business , since the cost of running 2 1-cpu systems is much higher than the cost of running 1 2-cpu system is much higjer than the cost of running 1 8-core-4-cpu system. I think I could make a decent profit leasing them for much more than they cost me to operate and still be offering them for a decent price. (Since I would also be able to aggregate the bandwidth between them.)

But that's a topic for my personal space ^.~

Motoko's Services are Being Moved to a New Site

Server Status: Up/Down

Server Notes
Motoko, our faithful servant now for almost 6 years, will be brought completely offline in the coming month to allow for us to cancel the DSL and get Comcast Cable internet service. For those of you who come over to my house it will be a VERY good thing as we'll be getting the 6 Meg up, 768K down kind, plus we know that the DSL SUCKS in the wind or rain, so we'll pick up stability, which is a huge plus.

"But what about my email/website/ventrilo server?! What will happen to it?" you ask.

Well, fear not. Though I'm not going to pay comcast some $30 a month to make it so that Motoko can sit on the cable line and make a lot of noise at my house and eat power and need cleaning and all those other annoying things that Motoko does, I WILL pay $25 to an offsite hosting company (www.godaddy.com) to host all of Motoko's services.

Enter Amalla. Amalla is the off site "Virtual Dedicated Server" that will host NQIG and all of it's affiliate sites. (The irony is that I was thinking about offering Virtual Dedicated Servers for you guys ^^; )

Soon, 5-10 days I suspect, I will complete bringing all of Motoko's services (Except for yours Oni. Sorry.) over to Amalla. After which Amalla will be about 80% functional, lacking only a few minor aspects of Motoko's functionality associated with DNS support (because I can't update the DNS records till they transfer. Oh ya, I'm transfering those to Go Daddy too because they're charging like 30% of what Network Solutions was.)

When the DNS services are complete, Motoko will be moved from primary functionality to secondary until we fully cancel the DSL service, after which time her hardware will be liberated for whatever devious means we might want to use it for. (Maybe add a vid card and make it a guest computer or something? No clue. I'm still working on that. She's only a Athelon 2000+ so she's kinda weak.)

There is an important note though: For the next week, I'm offlining the forum and recommending that if you actually want to see your data end up on Amalla, you resist uploading anything until I give the go-ahead. Since I'll be copying the data by hand, there's no promise that I may miss something you upload after I copy.

I may finish the copy today, or it may take me a week; I don't know. But I will make all reasonable effort to be prompt with the changeover to minimize the disturbance to services.

This is going to ROCK, but it's kinda scary. Never had a whole SERVER hosted in another location before. But I suspect things will go well.