| Wednesday, 8 February 2006 | 2:37 PM |
| | V2: Thread Actions menu Starting today, I'm going to be talking about (and sometimes showing) bits and pieces from V2. This is an opportunity to discuss one feature at a time. We'll shed some light on how that feature is going, and you all can send us some feedback about your likes and dislikes while we are working on it.
Today's topic is the Thread Actions menu. V2 will (over time) has different options on how to display things, but the default in the default themes packs is to use menus to clear out the clutter of so many icons and buttons. Sometimes, icons and buttons are faster and easier, so for things that happen often, we use them, but for admin like things where you don't do it often, we slide a lot into a menu.
In a thread page (think the UltraForum style), there is a list of messages where the author is one side, and the thread on the other. Each author block and message block will have a menu to deal with just that author or just that thread. My next posting will be about that.
But today, we have the Thread Actions menu at the bottom of the thread.
When you click Thread Actions, you get the above menu. Watch thread (or forum) is a way to get email notices about the the thread (or forum). Feature As has three choices: Announcement, Sticky, and Normal. Move To has all the other forums that are within the community (where a community is comparable to an Index page on V1). Bookmark menus should be self explanitory.
Show Printable and Download Thread are unimplemented at this time, and may not make it to the first version we put out. We will have a different CSS sheet for printing, so just the act of printing will automatically give a printable version.
Selecting some items like Watch Thread or Lock Thread, etc., will use AJAX to do the dirty work. What this means, is that it happens in the background -- no need to do a whole page refresh like we do today. Should make things faster and easier. 
N54/Steven Roussey/My Weblog | | Friday, 27 January 2006 | 12:39 PM |
| | No news is good news Usually when we get into the office we ask each other what is new. Generally speaking, no news is good news. No one naively threating to sue us (it no longer has any effect other than to leave certain posts up, as other parties in a potential lawsuit may need them). No major server problems. Etc. No news is good news indeed (as my Dad would say).
Some news would be good news, say a nice article on Network54. Or better still, something about our new v2 service when it comes online. But the best we have right now is a mention in an article about Google, China, and how the "Don't be evil" corporation blocks a number of sites from their Chinese site, including yours truly. Somehow, I don't think they are blocking Blogger.
Unfortunately, even a mention like that is not so good. They gave out a list of sites that in China's firewall. Due to their "smart" firewall, any one of those sites, if they so chose, could China to firewall anyone the want. All they have to do is change their IP address to other peoples IP addresss, and those will be blocked too. Or do it on a subdomain (sometimes the China firewall ignores different subdomains, perhpas because of this). At any rate, the DNS servers of anyone on that list in the news.com article is now a target. Hackers would love to have China block all the IP addresses of Walmart including their sites and VPNs for contacting suppliers in China. Think of the endless hacker fun!
Now there would be a story. Just not ours. Looking into that possible future, no news is good news.
N54/Steven Roussey/My Weblog | | Thursday, 12 January 2006 | 4:42 PM |
| | EFF and Your Rights Online As a interactive computer service we are rather well protected by the law from liability for what people say on this site. But I do want to put out some information, since you as a forum owner (or blogger) have the same protections as we do. You are still liable for what you say, don't forget. 
Anyhow, I pulled up a few documents to look at should you ever have reason to do so, or are at least interested:
Support Bloggers' Rights!
N54/Steven Roussey/My Weblog | | Friday, 26 August 2005 | 7:43 PM |
| | Infrastructure It has been a long process and has slowed development of v2, but it has been necessary to build our hardware and software server platform on which the Network54 code runs. We are about one week away from being complete. In fact, next week on Friday (September 2) we will have a hard downtime, meaning that the site will be completely offline. More about that later.
The backstory: we have been running this site for a long time. And that means that most of the equipment is old. Some really old, and failing. So over the last few months we have done the following:
1. Replaced our database servers (with nice ones that have redundant power, redundant system disks, etc.).
2. Replaced our storage arrays (but one) (they also have redundant power, also every disk has a redundant second, and it has spares)
3. Replaced our power systems.
4. Replaced 80% of our webservers.
5. Upgraded the OS on all the machines to RHEL 3.
6. Later, upgraded the DB machines to RHEL 4.
7. Changed ISP, and changed IP addresses (latency is 10x faster!)
8. Changed application server software version.
9. Changed webserver software and architecture (Keep-Alive is now on so image loading and chat should seem snappier).
10. Many changes to enhance security and backups. After our big competitor lost 5 years of their customers' posts, we wanted to make sure that didn't happen to us. Nothing is perfect, of course, but we have regular backups encrypted and stored across the country. So even if there is an earthquake and fire that destroys all of los angeles, if we are still alive, we will be able to reconstruct up to at worst a week behind. Well, except for images, they are a different system and don't get backed up so often. Something that is chaged for v2.
What is left:
Saturday: 10 minute "read-only" mode. I need to check what is wrong with one of the storage arrays so we know what to plan for later in the week.
Monday: Update the OS on the webservers. No one should notice as we will pull one out at a time.
Tuesday: Likely one hour "read-only" mode as we replace the main storage array that we are checking on Saturday.
Friday: Physically moving the equipment to a new rack. Nothing will be plugged in for a while, thus the hard downtime. Expect the site to be truly down all day. It should only take four hours, with only about one to two of complete downtime. I think we will have an extra server just sitting there with a plain maintenance page, but no read-only. So we are hoping for only a couple hours, but packing food, etc. in case we are there all day.
N54/Steven Roussey/My Weblog | | Wednesday, 22 June 2005 | 11:57 AM |
| | RedHat thinks ext3 is just great (too bad they are wrong) Ever try and and create more than 32k directories inside one folder? Say more than 32001? Well don't use ext3. It's 16-bit. You can use ReiserFS though. Well, in RHEL 3 you can. Not in RHEL 4. Beware the problems of upgrading! The people that make these decisions are the same one that probably thought that nobody would want files larger than 2GB. Suprised RedHat didn't pull that out too!
RedHat server software supports fewer resources than in previous versions. And we pay for this? Not for long...
N54/Steven Roussey/My Weblog | | Monday, 6 June 2005 | 6:26 PM |
| | Of Backups and Other Paranoia ezBoard experienced a hack into their systems last week that decimated all their hosted forums. It wasn't the first attack on message boards in the last year: over 30,000 phpBB boards were erased by a virus that took advantage of a flaw in that software. Most people forget to update their software, so while Google ended the attack (they were used by the virus to search for other hackable sites) many are still vulnerable.
I feel for the ezBaord crew. It really hurts when your service is not online as expected all the time. For Chris and I, we have been doing this with Network54 for so long that when anything goes wrong, it is an intensely emotional experience.
News of the whole event made us re-evaluate our backup strategy which resulted in a couple of small but important changes. One of which is to store some backups outside of California. It's earthquake country here after all!
Luckily, we don't store messages in the file systems of hundreds of servers. At first glance it might seem like a good idea since one system failure would only take out a small percentage of data. But if you run a grid like operation like we do (and I assume they do), then there is the idea of "Catastrophic Failure" where a virus or hacker on one machine can use the grid tools to spread destruction to all the others. Not only that, but I have no idea how to backup data in such a way. It would require skills we don't have.
So we use a database for all our data and messages (minus images, something we'll fix in the future). Databases allow us to stream changes to other machines running databases such that the other servers continuously reconstruct complete and up-to-the-second backups. We have a few of them in different locations. One is right on site in case the main database cluster goes down (in this situation it takes over immediately and you get a read only version of the site while we get notified). The others take snapshots at various intervals and keep the logs that update from one snapshot to the other -- this way we can go back to any time between snapshots and recover. And recovery is fast (instantaneous if the on site backup was OK, longer if we have to drive to the datacenter -- this is Los Angeles so driving time is an important consideration).
We never swimmed in millions of investor dollars, and we know that our data is your data and without you we would be a ghostown of the internet, so we have and will put our paranoia into data protecting action. Can't afford not to.
N54/Steven Roussey/My Weblog | | Wednesday, 25 May 2005 | 5:53 PM |
| | Tragedy Well, my part of N54 v2 got pushed back almost a month. I was sick for a week, then had a death in the family and the family reunion that it inspired. Then everyone in my family got sick – everyone. Me, in particular. So about three weeks have gone by while I have been unable to do much of anything. At least my fever is down five degrees. It is taking a while for my mind to get back up to speed. Sorry to make everyone wait…
N54/Steven Roussey/My Weblog | |
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