World: r3wp

You may recall a recent tweet of his finding a lot of Amiga relics 
in his basement .. so he's going to sell them

I guess cindy was tired of looking at them and it was either ebay 
or the garbage...  ;-)

how many wives go down to the basement??

Unless he needs the space to store his wine??

I guess if he starts to refer to his basement as a cellar we will 
know :)

My guess is IOS was never sold to Reichart, in fact it might be Altme, 
where Softinnov was owner, but now Altme/Softinnov/whatever  fully 
belongs to Carl. It is just the same as me talked Carl into releasing 
/pro components for free ...

Nobody is asking Carl, because we want Carl working on R3, not fixing 
AltME.

SoftInnov is Dockimbel's company .. maybe you're thinking of SafeWorlds?

Carl told me that IOS was sold to Reichart's company

when I was asking him to open source it

yes, sorry, it was SafeWorlds of course. Did not know about IOS state, 
but - IOS was definitely at least one level upon the comm architecture 
of altme ....

I think that someone from RM Assest who is now close to Carl would 
have to ask Carl, about the possiblity of open-sourcing AltME, but 
- AltME is used even by some commercial entities, so I don't know 
if it is likely to happen. As for me, I prefer Carl working on R3. 
And I can't see the situation being dramatic, nor do I agree with 
the launch of the new world. In such a case, I might consider not 
being present. I am used to be here, and apart from personal messages, 
there is not any significant slowdown or outages lately. We were 
in much worse situation in the past imo ...

How about ... we create a backup of this world somewhere, and prune 
all the rarely used groups from here?

I seem to have missed the details on how exactly AltME gets slow 
- it feels OK to me, these days. No real lag when submitting a message.

Of course, all of you are always more then welcome to join me via 
IRC in #rebol on freenode.

Andreas, are there non-altME users there?

Not really, no.

Every few days someone stumbles by but only to quickly leave again 
in general. Every few weeks one of those passersby actually asks 
something. And then, about one out of three of those questions is 
actually REBOL-related.

ok

(Which I find quite interesting, given that I never ever mentioned 
#rebol publicly. Well, at least until an hour ago.)

My two posts just now were very fast, so the slowdown is neither 
consistent nor universal.

The slowdown is for PMs

Except for that message which took 7 seconds

Maybe I should setup altme on another PC and see whether the slowdown 
is a local effect ... ie see how long it takes for a message to appear 
on the other instance

I think it's a combination of AltMe and the server it's running on.

Can anyone tell me if the problem with un-reserved worlds becoming 
unreachable, has been fixed?

I want to put a second world on my computer / world server and in 
the past I spent a fair bit of time resetting worlds due to them 
becoming unreachable.

Carl says he fixed it

But to be sure you could pay the reservation price

Yeah, I know.  Just showing some people what AltME has to offer. 
 Not sure if they are going to use it or not.  Thanks for the reply.

It has been fixed. I run two worlds, and no unexpected outages since 
the time of the fix ....

Brock, I've been running 2 unreserved and 1 reserved world for years 
without any issues.

My world, linux version running on linux machine, has just become 
unreachable since noon after working for years. Nothing changed on 
that side - the altme.com web site reports it as reachable. I can 
connect to it from the linux box it's on, but not from the W XP box 
sitting alongside nor any other.

un-reserved name for the world

updated the server and now accessible

Is this world much faster since Carl reinstalled it ?

yes, pm'ing is now usable again

maybe I can return to my old persona ....

You should give it a try. Whatever was done to this world, it was 
good :) Let's hope it stays that way for a while.

Looks like the linode instance it was running on was pehaps overbooked!

http://www.rebol.com/linode-speed.html

Looks like an HDD going south ...

Might also explain the file corruption for restored groups here.

actually, the corruption is easily explained by the backup taking 
place at the same time of someone posting to those groups

there should be no corruption, when proper back-up tools are used, 
no? :-) (e.g. shadow-copy principles, etc.)

if Carl is just doing a TAR while the altme server is running, it's 
not strange that one or two files don't get backed up correctly. 
a quick workarourd is to keep more than just the last backup, as 
the chance of a file missing from two backups is pretty small.


of course, ideally one would be using ZFS and backing up from a snapshot...

the workaround is to use proper back-up tools, not just tarring the 
stuff :-)

It doesn't help that the client can't detect the issue and save the 
old data somehow. Once you sync a corrupted group, your local store 
is gone (unless you're backing them up locally ;-).

(I am backing them up locally, by the way, if Carl needs anything)


Proper backup tools can't do anything against the altme server overwriting 
the files. Either your filesystem supports snapshots, or the altme 
server has to support the backup operation directly at least by suspending 
file activity while the files are being copied (or, the file storage 
has to be designed so that files are immutable, that way at the very 
least you can't lose old data because of overwriting)

is it just me or does this mean that moderation and message alteration 
is actually possible... 

it would only require a few changes to the server and client so they 
support this feature.