Related.. are there any plans to release OGS as open source as per DGS? One crude way of "load balancing" (not in the strict sense) is to have a number of OGS.

Back up.

_________________
Where've you been? Zatoichi could slice the board in half, put it back together again and rearrange the position so fast that no-one even knew he'd drawn his sword - and he was blind. ~ John Fairbairn

And back down again? Things don't look good when I look at http://senseis.xmp.net/?OGS%2FStatus

Aye. The last news post I saw on the site was that disk drives were going.

Remind me again why the site keeps clinging to the cheap option rather than moving to commercial hosting paid for with our subscription money?

I'm not entirely sure, but I heard the current subscription base is just short of being able to break even on commercial hosting (back when Graham was admin he paid for about half of the hosting fees out of his own pocket).

Nainwak is a not-for-profit organization. A portion, if not all, of the subscription proceeds for OGS is given to them (the advantage, of course, is that there is no fixed commitment which would be required for commercial hosting). When OGS made the decision to be hosted by Nainwak there was no anticipation of reliability issues.

There was a period a while back (2009 perhaps?) that we also had frequent downtime, OGS considered moving to a different host, but as the situation stabilized we decided to stay with Nainwak.

I think Nainwak is also working to solve the issue, but moving to a commercial host has been brought up again a few days ago (before the current downtime).

Neither Slicehost nor Linode have that problem, either.


...I see. I don't suppose anybody could shed some light on why not?

Or, for that matter, how many subscribers at what amount is enough to pay for proper hosting?

There's a lot of wrong saying here.

Stops shouting at nainwak, they are in the same situation than OGS (how can we separe OGS from Nainwak??).
When OGS was running alone, Graham has to put a big amount of his own money into OGS hosting.
Then Graham was having personal issues and handed to me the administration of OGS and I had no sufficient resources to pay
for such hosting so I decided to look for a cheap solution. Anyway all the solutions I found were so expensive they were non
acceptable. I found a solution that was around 30euros per month but that was really unreliable. Then a friend introduced me
to Nainwak which was providing the good solution for OGS. Nainwak was succeeding in beeing up 99% of the time. Moreover, Nainwak
provided the legal context in which I could run OGS.

Just remember that each time you propose a solution for OGS that:
- OGS needs proper php modules (Apache/PHP/MySQL as base + a backend using proper PHP_svn module + svn server)
- OGS needs a good amount of bandwidth (actually 50Gb / month)
- OGS needs a good database ( I don't have the access rate but the size is 500 Megabytes in memory)
- OGS needs a backup plan (We have daily backups on Nainwak + RAID array)

That generally doesn't come for free. Moreover, general dedicated offer doesn't come with skilled sysadmins. I already
have a hard time finding skilled and motivated people to work on OGS code, I won't imagine finding skilled, motivated and
available people for sysadmins and handling the legal issues.


Anyway, now current problems are:
1/ Nainwak hardware is running old
2/ recently the private compagny that was providing server slots to Nainwak for free has changed policy leading to
several hardware problems related to the lack of air conditioning (!).

For 1/ we were thinking of changing just the servers. However, the second point convinced us to move to a new hosters. However, this
is not doable in 5 seconds. This was decided a long time ago (if you'd take a 5 minutes to browse the related threads in OGS forums, you
would have known). However, this was signed only one week ago and now it's technician work in action. I doubt we will switch on the server
before we have switched the servers.

As for the anticipation of reliability issues you cannot do that easily. Just remember we switched servers two years ago now and
we had no reason to forsee that.

For those who wonder why we don't used the money to switch server before, the answer is simple : there was no reason for that until recently and we have
our personnal and professional life outside maintaining OGS and Nainwak.

For those who wonder where did the money go, the answer is also simple: it was saved in anticipation of this kind problem and it will now be used to complete
the yearly incomes to pay for the servers.

For the other questions I won't answer as I answered several times already.

PS: For the choice of secureserver (lifein19x19 hoster), the offer is similar to the one we chosen.

For the record: it's kind of difficult to read the OGS forums at the moment.

I personally understand the difficulties of trying to find a reliable and cheap solution. However it is quite disconcerting to be in the dark. I'm sure that some other source of info would be useful to quell the public. I suggest a twitter account where we're kept in the loop of things. Just the occasional "the server just went down, we are working on it" should help. Just my 2 cents.

Thanks for the detailed response.

A note here and an update to the SL OGS/Status page would go a long way toward providing good distribution to the OGS community when the site itself isn't available. I'm not on Twitter, but a feed for status there (and other periodic annoucements such as Tournament starts) would seem appropriate as another point of contact and another out-of-band status update.

Thanks for your efforts. I support large distributed systems and appreciate the challenges you have keeping the site available.

_________________
Traveller
Clark B. Wierda
Ann Arbor, MI, USA
AGA 20k, OGS 14k, DGS 16k, KGS ?

I also appreciate dmg's post, here. The question of communicating problems to the OGS users came up at the OGS forum, and Twitter was suggested there, too. I, for one, prefer either here of Sensei's, as I don't use twitter and find the whole twitter world somewhat annoying, anyway. (But that's just me.)

Anyway, dmg, thanks for giving us an update. I hpe you will continue to do so as your work progresses. I look forward to OGS's return!

+1

It might be worth putting the OGS forums on separate hosting, so that people could browse to forums.online-go.com even when the main game server is down.

OGS is back up!

Thank you, dmg (and any others here who may have been involved), for all your hard work, and especially for stopping by here to post and clear up the issues that you addressed.

The latest post on the OGS forums is by Hourousha, announcing that OGS is now on Twitter.

_________________
"I teach you the overplay. Joseki is something that shall be overcome.
What have you done to overcome it?"
— Nietzsche, via Bill Spight

Down again?

_________________
Where've you been? Zatoichi could slice the board in half, put it back together again and rearrange the position so fast that no-one even knew he'd drawn his sword - and he was blind. ~ John Fairbairn

Seems to be working for me.

Weird. Tried several times last night and nothing - today page loads no problem. Guess it was something on my end that sorted itself out.

_________________
Where've you been? Zatoichi could slice the board in half, put it back together again and rearrange the position so fast that no-one even knew he'd drawn his sword - and he was blind. ~ John Fairbairn