Announcement from El Cajon - TFS is not gone...

[RRio]

Moderator's Note: The orginial thread had taken a turn for the worse, was locked and moved to MISC. I have posted El Cajon's orginial post, pinned and locked, as a courtesy to him. --Rawhide Rio


Posted Oct. 5, 2005, by El Cajon

Howdy folks,

A lot of you are disappointed about TFS. I am too. I have not been communicating as of late because if I am spending time writing messages, I am not doing my job in the trenches. The site is something I do in my spare time, when I am not tending to my day job, tending to my wife, family and house responsibilities. I spend upwards of 20-30 hours of my spare time some weeks working on this effort.

I want to explain why its been difficult to get the site back up due to the problems I have with where I keep my server. I will not name the company because the owner really has worked hard to install the physical hardware and support it over the three years I have been there. I am friend of the owner who graciously let me rent space given I am a micro micro sized entity. I have the direct cell phone of the owner. How many customers have that? I pay a small fee every month, much much less than what I could spend with any other firm for the same service. The owner hires workers and unfortunately those workers are not always talented.

Anyway, I own the server and support it remotely unless hardware needs mending. Its called dedicated hosting or rack hosting. They provide the physical location, I provide everything else. As many of you know, the problems all started when I blew a hard drive several months back. It was replaced and everything was going well for a couple months, however, it was installed incorrectly. A pin was broken which eventually caused a short in the  hard drive controller when it loosened free. As a result it went down again. This time though major damage ensued. I cannot directly prove it was the result of improper installation or just bad hardware. I'm left holding the bag.

I had to have all the hard drives replaced a second time, as well as the controller. Then I needed to have reinstalled the operating system and everything uploaded again. As luck would have it, this all happened when I was in the middle of a backup so I have backups as of July 05.

Once the machine was restored, I come to find out that the employee who did this completely replaced my machine with a different one of lower quality without my permission. I am talking with the owner to try to get my originial machine back and sent to me. In the three years I have been with them, new options have opened up for me so that I can create a climate controlled smart room in my house. I have been working hard on the physical build of the smart room. Its currently framed out, exterior completed, wiring run, and electric drops installed. I need to do some more work on it but its nearly complete.

In the mean time I have spent the last several weeks preparing new dedicated business lines that were run to the house which was completed today. The speed is 3.0 meg up and 1.0 meg down. That's about three times as fast as a standard DSL/Cable modem line. Plently of bandwidth for server support. Those lines were completed today. I have to test them and install them.

I am currently waiting for my server to be shipped out to me and then I can restore TFS.

I know everyone is upset and disappointed. By me moving the site in house, I have physical access to the machine and can ensure no more mistakes happen by people with less experience than me. (I support hardware and develop software for one of the largest insurance companies in America.) I am also working on a second physical server to work in tandem with the other server for better reliability.

I spend a lot of money on computer hardware, including building costs for the smart room build out, which is for my own use yes, and which I do not mind donating some to the efforts of TFS. I want to say that in spite of my best efforts to be honest and accomodating, that I have received word of comments made which make me feel that perhaps bringing back TFS is not necessary. I hope not everyone feels this way. I will chalk it up to frustration. I feel bad about the whole situation and regret it happened. Believe me I am working as hard as humanly possible to restore service. It's just me and nights. I have no employees.

Thanks for the support along the way folks. It's been a rough ride at times, real fun at other times; hopefully it can continue. Setbacks are bound to happen now and in the future. The site is a fun diversion for me and others. I hope it can remain that way.

I regret if this message sounds in any way harsh or less than positive. I am a bit frustrated.

Thanks!!

El Cajon