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[Updated] Hardware Donation Drive Over -- And Thank You!
12 years ago
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We're pleased (and surprised!) that in less than two days we've managed an incredible amount of support. We've received well over $5,000 worth of gear and almost $1,000 in giftcards for new hardware within 2 days!
What we were able to raise:
2X Supermicro SuperServer SYS-6027R-WRF ($1,200 each!)
2X Intel Xeon 6C E5 2620
96GB of RAM
6X Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 HDDs
6X Western Digital Red (3TB)
$936.11 in Amazon Gift Cards to use to by additional hardware
We will buy out the remaining hardware and items from on our side. We want to extend thanks to everyone who helped you. We could not have done this without you, and this site would not be here without you.
Thank you.
Among the contributors:
kits5786, 
Sargon, 
Taasla, 
Jarlidium, 
Datfatcat, 
WhimsicalUnicorn, 
TheSnowedOne, 
SolidState, 
BrokkenTWolf, 
Draconas, 
Baphnedia,
carme-wolf, 
marymouse, 
flamingrawrs, 
biscuits, 
cyrin, 
foxwolfie, 
urbanhermit, Sidney K., Sam W., Nadja V., Narkiel, Mirepoix, and others! More names will be added as they are confirmed.
Jarlidium Press was one of the individuals who purchased a SuperMicro server chassis, and as such has earned our respect for life. Not to mention free advertising. Jarlidium is a furry publishing company, and have been long time supporters of furry art and artists.
Be sure to check out their page (and their booths at conventions) to offer them thanks.
We have all this hardware coming, now what? First, we have to wait for the gear to arrive, then assemble it. As things come in, we'll ill post pictures, scan invoices (names removed) and post all (ALL!) transaction logs for the money and donations to show full accountability. It may take a few weeks for the gear to come in, but we'll keep you update to date on their progress and keep things completely transparent.
UPDATE 1: Added more donors to the list
Hardware and donations are starting to come in already!
https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/statu.....22456820785154
https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/statu.....92324023054337
UPDATE 2: Added more donors.
What we were able to raise:
2X Supermicro SuperServer SYS-6027R-WRF ($1,200 each!)
2X Intel Xeon 6C E5 2620
96GB of RAM
6X Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 HDDs
6X Western Digital Red (3TB)
$936.11 in Amazon Gift Cards to use to by additional hardware
We will buy out the remaining hardware and items from on our side. We want to extend thanks to everyone who helped you. We could not have done this without you, and this site would not be here without you.
Thank you.
Among the contributors:
kits5786, 
Sargon, 
Taasla, 
Jarlidium, 
Datfatcat, 
WhimsicalUnicorn, 
TheSnowedOne, 
SolidState, 
BrokkenTWolf, 
Draconas, 
Baphnedia,
carme-wolf, 
marymouse, 
flamingrawrs, 
biscuits, 
cyrin, 
foxwolfie, 
urbanhermit, Sidney K., Sam W., Nadja V., Narkiel, Mirepoix, and others! More names will be added as they are confirmed.Jarlidium Press was one of the individuals who purchased a SuperMicro server chassis, and as such has earned our respect for life. Not to mention free advertising. Jarlidium is a furry publishing company, and have been long time supporters of furry art and artists.
Be sure to check out their page (and their booths at conventions) to offer them thanks.
We have all this hardware coming, now what? First, we have to wait for the gear to arrive, then assemble it. As things come in, we'll ill post pictures, scan invoices (names removed) and post all (ALL!) transaction logs for the money and donations to show full accountability. It may take a few weeks for the gear to come in, but we'll keep you update to date on their progress and keep things completely transparent.
UPDATE 1: Added more donors to the list
Hardware and donations are starting to come in already!
https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/statu.....22456820785154
https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/statu.....92324023054337
UPDATE 2: Added more donors.
In two days?!
That's pretty crazy!
New hardware? Good.
Not fucking it up? At least try this time. :)
It's cool that you received such a tremendous support
2. Reading the manual of this board and from servers i have built in the past and serviced. This motherboard does required Registered ECC DDR3 DIMMS. Also these CPUs are not designed for ram voltage over 1.5v If over 1.5v you are sacrificing stability and to get it working better with higher voltage on the dimms than 1.5v requires tweaking voltages to the memory controller and other parts of the cpu beyond intel's recommended levels
We also tend to do burn in tests on the hardware/drives to make sure they're fine. It won't always catch them, but if a drive or part is a lemon, it will usually let us know.
1st one it destroyed its own platters after a year n a half sent that back got another from seagate a repaired one and that one died about 2 weeks ago with the heads giving out, thankfully they heads kinda held it together long enough for me to backup my data.
now I put a WD 2TB Green Drive in my external instead with the idle timer disabled ofc and its running nice so far, cool and silent ;D
but you can use there DOS app WDIDLE3 to change or disable it, since mine was for use in a enclosure I just flat out disabled it.
and ya the performance of the 7200.11 was good but really I felt like I was using a deathstar xD teh 1st time the 7200.11 went out I lost everything :( thankfully teh 2nd time I didnt the first time it went out it did it without warning just the next day powered up and the bios was having issues listing the hdd's then I discovered why and was like ffffffffffuuuuuuuuu-
... is fuckin' awesome, haha.
Make good use of it, guys. As best you can, anyway.
Good for you guys! And to everyone that was able to donate, "wow!"
<3 maybe next time hehe.
But... i dont know.. that money would go for games and comissions >-> Mineee! lol
and yeah maybe next time i get paypal i donate lol
I dont have paypal xD
Me neither, haha.
There will be times for you too where we can afford it :) Let's hope we are still furries by then ._. xD
Wait.
i will be a furry forever..
My kids will be furry!
my Entire family will be furry! lol
Good plans! :3
lol even GOD!
bottom line. its a 2 way street. you need good (relatively) code with good (again, relatively) servers if you want to run something big. Lets hope they arnt running TF2 on them... again.
This Server - Reliable Code
Affordable car - Maintained and driven by grandma
This Server - Messy unreliable code from 200?
Affordable car - Maintained and driven by a young inexperienced nova-boy.
I never said FA didn't need new parts, but the frequency is pretty often.
This explains so much...
I know which I prefer
But is any of the site slowness do to the massive amount of data with submissions and journals that are being put onto this site all the time for what is getting closer to being a decade?
*Gives You A Bone* Now go fetch it boy.
Duke nukem forever actually came out.
Which is what I was referring to.
I actually have -some- leftover hope that Valve will make episode 3 look awesome. o.o;
You could even open source the code, and the let whole community hammer away at making it better, if you don't mind sharing it.
At the risk of sounding like an infomercial, I am more than happy to help anyone who needs ideas how to do this.
Besides, it's not really about being popular or talented. I'm not popular and I cleared about $200 in the past two months without either advertising/opening for commissions or straining myself.
In the end it's about finding what works for you, for your art style, your method, as well as your fanbase. I've seen artists who are barely able to draw offer $5 sketch commissions and I can garantee they can easily make $100 a month doing that.
People just don't think about it from a proper business stand point. You have to sit down and think about what can you offer that others don't, what are your strengths and weaknesses, actually think up a price range, justify the values and all. Most people just go with default prices like $10 a sketch, $30 per full picture, and they completely ignore the fact that the prices should be tailored to their art/process/fanbase.
Not to mention the fact that a lot, easily the majority, of artists on FA severely undercharge for their art, to the point where I've seen people saying $200 dollars for a full pictures was a crime, and then I checked the artist and.. well.. I can tell their art would be worth thousands on a corporate level.
It's all about doing your own thing, experimenting, seeing what works and having fun ^^
Thousands? Quite possibly.
In addition to that, the cost of living is increasing and artists living off their work need to be able to support themselves. spending money on donations may not be in the budget. (this is true in my case but I'm not an artist)
Thank you to those who had a reasonable amount of disposable income and donated some of it to the site.
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/...../#cid:32118951
Please don't ignore me again. That almost makes it look like it is a question you don't want answered, and that would just be the most terrible thing.
:/ Back off, and take it easy.
Go sit down and let the adults talk.
Those people donated to keep the servers in working condition, which was done and completed. All the money went to keeping the servers up. There was no ' Fraud ', or ' Stealing of cash '. And as for the site update, no ' Due by ' date was tacked onto it.
It will get here when it gets here. If you feel that this really is such an issue, lawyer up! I look forward to watching the laughable case you present. :)
Gawd, when reality smacks you and all the rest of you crybabies in the face, you may one day appreciate that a free service costs quite a bit of money to maintain. Enjoy your 'reality' while it lasts.
Also here http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/...../#cid:32093179 he said that he did have to get replacement parts. So there's part of your answer right there. Spending some time reading might help.
Pestering someone on multiple journals about it won't get you an answer any sooner. It's also equally as terrible. If you have a problem with where your money is going, don't donate.
Go sit down and let the adults talk.
Very mature of you, Mr. Adult.
Be nice, damn it! It's not hard.
My ban evade senses are tingling...
* Throws on his Tinfoil Hat *
MUCH better.
I await the day when the world wide web is a civilized place, buuut... our generation and the ones after us will be deceased before we ever see any progress on that issue. Which makes me sad.
In 2008, we suffered catastrophic hardware failure. The site went down for a month, and users raised a little over $16,000 for new hardware. We bought new hardware, including a Dell PowerEdge 2970 and a Sun Fire x4150. We also bought other upgrades and necessary items for the server (including rails, harddrives, PDUs and other items).
http://imgur.com/jaGRDSv (some of the items bought, not all).
By the by, donations to the site are NOT tax free given we are a business. Donating to a business does not make them tax free, and we did have to pay taxes on that, and I had to claim that as profit.
You state that you were lied to, and that you lied to the community. The timelines you gave for this supposed fraud are not accurate at all. We did not have a donation drive in 2009.
I don't have an issue with selling them, but redundancy is good.
This whole situation reeks of a question that they do not want answered, as evidenced by their continued silence and misdirection. It really worries me, as I love this site and what it provides. I just know that not everyone is as honest as they should be, and we're dealing with two things that always seem to lead to trouble: furries and money.
And yet I answered him in this post and the original post.
Wish I could have done more than a puny $20 in gift cards, but glad you got what you needed at least.
once again the furrys have pulled thru!
FA: "all righty then!!"
FA: "Building a server!"
...
FA: "uuuuyyy!! look at that!"
Kayrom: "Thanks!"
FA: "Spy is sappin my server!"
FA: "Server down!!"
...
Kayrom: "Need a dispenser (server) here!"
FA: "nope"
...
Pyro: "babarassspaaa!!"
...
"pyro disconected by user... reason... fatal system crash"
it has the firewall attachment in it and its pristine. My step-mom is nagging to get it out of the office. Maybe want to buy it, I can work out a good deal for you guys. I'd give it to you but its not mine and I am sure he will give it to you for a good deal seen as how your my "friends" its like 6 feet tall or so, only thinking because 96 GB of ram needs a lot of space!
Fortunately the market is there for SDD's so hopefully the reliability will keep going up, while prices get more competitive with HDD's.
\o/ YAY! \o/
On a side note ... Eleven cents? I hope no one was being a bugger and donating one cent gift cards! =P
But like I said, what I'd like to help FA with is to get some extra servers set up in other countries... including in Europe. Still surprised a site as large as FA has only one server in one building from one country. Hope the mods are ever considering that.
sorry to say but yeah there are a millon better places to give money to.
hell theres even charities for art foundations if you wanna hang in that direction /:
thats a load of balony if he was banned for pointing that out.
but im sure it was 'cus he made a call out bout admins'
i must find the worlds tiniest violin
im rootin for this little engine... and praying the caboose carrying all the porn burns... but mostly rooting for the engine!
:D
There's a lot of stuff wrong with this site. You talk about full accountability. When will you publicly address these issues?
Does this mean we are in for an extended downtime?
And the patrons ofvthe site that do nothing but complain..if you arent happy please leave sobthe rest of us can enjoy what neervandstqff "are" accomplishing and stop focusing on what they arent.
Know thats 80% why yalls relationships are a flop. Cant see the good in things and focusing purely on all the bad.
And hardly see how relationships need to be dragged into this.
And was more talking about the constant complainers notvthe people inquiring about better the site
And just in case you hadn't noticed, people have been leaving and setting up alternative accounts on Weasyl. I'd suggest you do the same. FA is a sinking ship.
As for politics i never really cared. Im neutral. I go with the flow of the river rather than go against it and yes that means even if i were to go over a waterfall.
I wake up. Eat. Feed dogs. Clean house. Eat again. Go to work. Come home and sleep. Where in that equation do i turn on the news and gripe about the government?
Not abandoning my fa ship anytime soon.
How's the Raspberry Pi working out?
I fucking love it.
Plus you've should've seen it before it was changed~
Also, everyone use Tor browser to download torrents and if you can afford it, get a Virtual Private Network service so your privacy is secured.
I love this site and the talented artists on here and I don't want to miss a single awesome picture uploaded here :3
As answered before I'm glad the lags will be less then, I thought it was my own connections until my friend said he had the same problem.
Time to get this thing up and running at full steam! x3
Just saying.
Devices will eventually run out of steam and pack in. That's what happens. code is only going to increase the longevity of hardware, and even then, not for some amazing duration as a result.
So replacements are gonna be needed. Simple as that.
You think old hardware was durable? Fuck no - tape jams, paper jams, punched cards, deterioration of moving parts over time, dust in cartriges preventing them from being read correctly. Old hardware was EXTREMELY volatile. Modern hardware is not.
When the hell has YouTube or Wikipedia or any site ever on existence has had to constantly buy new hardware because "the old stuff just broke in two years mysteriously".
The question is not about durability, more powerful hardware is being mooched up to get more cycles to process the terrible code to cover for the website slowing down from expanding.
I've had my computer running practically 24/7 for the better part of a decade and all I've ever needed was a GPU replacement, and the conditions at my house are to say the least less than ideal.
So yeah, I don't know what you're on about and I don't think you do either.
Take the same example as is up top. Bad grandma who can't drive well, and an A Student who can.
BOTH are going to need a tune up eventually, ignoring the fact both drive differently.
THIS is THAT TUNEUP.
Dont like the code? The old charm of this site?
INKBUNNY AND WEASYL AWAITS, GOOD SIR.
Bitching about the problem, WON'T FIX IT.
> I think if they were any good at coding anything they wouldn't need to mooch hardware constantly :I
That implies the coding is the issue here, which it is NOT.
Get it rite.
Nope, don't have to cover your tracks. Already right there in the open.
This would not be a problem if you had, say, a hundred to a thousand database entries, even a calculator could probably handle that if you hooked it up to a cable, even if it was programmed badly, but in this case there are hundreds of thousands.
So, if the code is programmed badly, for instance - the author had not considered expansion, then naturally the performance will deteriorate over time and the worst solution to the problem is getting more CPU cycles.
Does this explain it to you?
You're the one who seem to have issues with what is being discussed.
If the code is fucked up, you loose order of magnitude in efficiency. It's not a matter of hardware being old / semi-outdated.
Nothing replaces really skilled coding and efficient design. Of course that is not easy to do...
How embarressing.
Also, http://owni.eu/2011/05/09/planned-o.....erconsumption/
It used to be possible though, but not these days.
I'm curious to see where this will lead FA.
Maybe? OuO Please?
Let's see how it goes~
Optimization is the elimination of redundancy.
Seriously, though, hardware just wears down.5 years is a lot of time when computers are concerned.
Actually, the dinosaur analogy is pretty apt. Fen, 'Neer, take fucking not this time, 'cause I won't say it again: read these comments. People don't give a toss about hardware, we want fucking site upgrades, and if you'd get up off your arses and write some stable code, we might not need to keep bailing you plonkers out every time a server rack explodes.
Jesus Christ. It's like I'm actually a bystander on a progressive, real-time episode of Only Fools and Horses.
' But i dun like does sites waaaahhhhh '
Then stop your complaining. Complaining won't fix anything. No one is twisting your arm to stay. :)
Freedom of service doesn't remove from users the right to complain about the [poor] quality of service. And from the most popular, long-serving fur art site on the web, you would expect those complaints to be addressed in short order, yes?
I've been a member of FA for getting along seven years. In those seven years, I have yet to see any significant return on the constant promises of code re-writes and improvements, or even the implementation of more than basic features you'd expect from any art site. Not only that, but I have seen user donations either wasted or straight-up embezzled by the site owners, offers of help flat-out ignored, and glaring issues within the site code glanced over with no real effective patch-out.
I actually ENJOY FA, for what it is - a place to store my subs and let other people enjoy them. I'd otherwise be content to just commission artists via other means and keep all my art on my HDD. What I don't enjoy is how the site seems to swing from one complete fucking disaster to another, while the site managers are more than content to just ignore the issues and continue to beg for money each time they have a hole they need digging out of. The simple solution would be for the staff to gain a little humility, take on some assistance that's actually at least fucking adept at code and hardware management, and get the site up to standards.
But of course, the site's free, and that means zero criticism rights, surely? Yeah, no, you're fucking stupid. 1/10, see me after class.
Dragoneer all but admitted (in a slippery, politician's way) that donations are never spent the way they should be, that the hardware those donation buys is less-than-standard for the job, and that for all the supposed code revisions, we're no closer now to a better-performing framework than we were five years ago.
If you can't take it from the horse's mouth, who CAN you take it from? It says something when a site manager has more-or-less stood up and said 'yeah, we don't spend your donations wisely, we never buy the stuff we need, we don't listen to sound advice, the code rarely gets a look in and the only reason we made it so that this time you lot buy the bits in for us is so that you can't accuse us of using the money to pay for more artwork of me getting fisted'.
Disagree with me if you like. I can link you the comments - I rarely make an unfounded accusation.
As a 15+ year IT dude, I can't agree or support any of your assertions, sorry to say. You do _not_ have to spend top dollar to get reliability, though don't expect to be able to pay what's under your couch cushions for quality hardware either. Expect to swing the needle towards moderate cost to get longevity. A basic 5 year PC w/i7, 4Gig ram, SSD, Windows 7, will run you $800-1000. A basic server (lets just say a basic fileserver with... 3TB of total space; around 15 spindles just to pull a number out) you should expect to pay no less than $8000 to probably right around $12k. All around pretty affordable.
But to everybody who donated, thank yoouuuu.
GOOGLE "DOA drive failure" AND CHECK OUT THE FIRST RESULT! No seriously, expect problems down the road.
According to UPS tracking, at my end, you should have another 32GB of server RAM now.
}:>
Also, I'm loving the fierce debates on here as they slowly degrade into hostile exchanges. Should be reason enough to keep FA going, right?~
... Just sayin'.
I wonder if all the RAM is the same brand, model, speed and if it's quality or SuperChineseQuality#1 brand ram made mostly of lead.
Brought to you by the grumpy, groggy mumblings of moot who doesn't want to go get soggy in the rain tilling the garden, and also a 15 year IT professional with roots in high speed SQL and medical software server building, diagnostics, repair and deployment. ie: someone who's been around the block enough times to see the mistakes beginners get sucked in to making when building servers.
Preparations for resulting infrastructure changes are under way.
I've been here since 2008 rather loyally but its really gotten bad. the sites condition i mean. if we cant do basic things like notes n stuff it makes using the site more difficult
A lot of things actually.
The new pair of servers will make a replicated database cluster. Care and caution need to be taken so that the setup works properly, correctly and efficiently.
After the setup is done, database would need to be migrated to it, preferably without downtime.
The former database server would need hardware maintenance and a fresh operating system, and configured to be the new application server as the current one is showing signs of hardware fatigue and need to be replaced.
Two more servers need to be consolidated so that one of them could be freed up to be the secondary data server.
A separate server needs to have it's OS reinstalled and configured to be a dedicated equipment for serving ads.
The user data storage format needs to be transitioned to UUID based instead of username and filename based, data migrated to the new format, site code and server software updated and reconfigured to work correctly with the new addressing scheme. This is required to make the storage distributed and easier to backup.
This isn't even half of everything that needs to be done on the invisible front™ that nobody knows or will know of.
A fact that FA still works is already a sign of work being done. With 500+ new users a day and constantly growing the demands for performance, storage and bandwidth keep increasing as well; which is far from linear.
[quote]
I thought we were supposed to get routine updates
[\quote]
Ideally, yes.
We're working on making that more of a a requirement instead of a forced habit.
merging servers and the like is just an overnight process, maybe a day or two but its not like it needs watching over. once it starts it does its own thing save for errors.
what the users see is 'yeah thats a lot of stuff, but when is it ever going to happen?'
I know you want this to sound like a ‘knowing is half the battle’ thing, but…really? ‘We’ve kept FA up until now, so you KNOW things on our end have progressed!’ Do you really expect people to buy into that explanation?
Don't give money to FA if they're not going to fix shit.
I fixed that for you.
(That's also how you can tell I don't work here.)
Brian Wisse ICT student from Holland.
I know Ubuntu has some good options to pay for.
Just simple curiosity since im learning my A+ and N+ soon