March 12th, 2012
Today I received an email from Neil over at KohlerCreated notifying me that his website’s database was down. I checked and some other blogs were effected too, so that meant that something was up with one of the database servers 
. We also had a VM server being removed from our rack at the datacenter today.
After being unable to connect, ping or RDP into the database server I figured that it might have been inadvertently powered down or disconnected when the VM server was being taken out.
Luckily I was able to call the datacenter admin before he left the datacenter (so he didn’t have to make a trip back) and he determined that one of the ethernet network cables had been inadvertently snagged and unplugged during the removal.
After he reconnected the ethernet, we were back in business 
While we regularly backup our databases, this experience has motivated me to work toward seamless failover capability for our database servers. Within the next few months I’ll be in Tulsa to install new switches and a new backup firewall, so now I will also work on the DB server redundancy and failover.
Thank you to our bloggers for your patience, we appreciate you using our service!
PS thanks to Neil for notifying us about the issue in the first place!
January 8th, 2012
Over the past few months our bandwidth usage has skyrocketed. So today we took the first steps in optimizing our bandwidth usage.
For our bloggers there should be no negative changes. However, there will be some cool perks:
+’leaderboard’ type info showing the top blogs on Weblogs.us
+better performance*
+we can reduce our overhead**
*since we can more easily find blogs that are being spammed or are outdated, we can remedy those issues and everyone benefits with less server load and faster response times etc.
**bandwidth is one of our primary costs, and every GB of transfer saved helps minimize expenses… which is very important since we are a volunteer based organization that does not charge for personal hosting!
April 7th, 2011
We just received 16GB more memory for our new 1U server.
The memory for the new server was kindly donated by:
Kanetix.ca: travel insurance Canada
Thanks guys!
More memory specs:
16GB (4 x 4GB)
240-Pin
DDR2
FB-DIMM
ECC Fully Buffered
DDR2 667 (PC2 5300)
4x 4gb 2Rx4 pc2-5300F-555-11
240-Pin DDR2 FB-DIMM ECC Fully Buffered DDR2 667 (PC2 5300)
March 29th, 2011
We’re very excited to have a nice new (to us) 1U server headed out way:
Still deciding whether this machine will become our primary DB server, or serve as a higher-end VM server for us. Either way, in addition to this one, we have one more server in our near future and hopefully we’ll be set for a while after that .
Processor: Two (2) Intel® Xeon® Quad Core Processor X5460 3.16GHz Harpertown 12M cache 1333MHz FSB
X5460 single CPU benchmarks (so the new server should be roughly twice as fast as these benchmarks…)
RAM: 8GB [Four (4) 2048mb D558CDual In-Line Memory Module, 2G, 667M, 256X72, 8, 240, 2RX8
(to be upgraded to 24GB total)
Power Supply: Two (2) P424D Power Supply, 670W, PMBUS Delta
Storage: 15K SAS drive for OS, SSD for data
Remote access: DRAC5 card (Dell Remote Access Card) installed
Ethernet: Gigabit ethernet network ports
The best part: this machine should provide some great additional speed and capability for all our bloggers .
March 26th, 2011
Happy Birthday to mtekk, our resident Linux expert, bane of spammers, and overall cool dude!
Apparently a GPU computing midterm took up most of his actual bday, so here’s hoping that the rest of the weekend is appropriately birthday-licious .
Thanks for all your hard work on Weblogs.us, we appreciate it!!!
March 26th, 2011
Just renewed our weblogs.sc domain registration. Whew, dotster charges an arm and a leg for .sc domains!
Alas, they are one of the only .sc registrars out there .
