Thoughts on the Networks financial difficulties...

sailoreagle on 15/2/2003 at 07:54

Peer-to-peer system, direct download server... hmm, smells like filehosting to me. :p

Ekim on 15/2/2003 at 20:55

What things does TTLG actually need to pay for? I'm not asking for a general idea, I'm asking for a shopping list. When I started a campaign to upgrade the UK's (then) only existing free-access internet provider, we did it by listing the main requirements and counting every donation on a list of 'what's paid for' - people like seeing the good their small donation has done, I think that several people donated just for the kick of seeing the chart move and thinking "I did that!"

That's my thought on how to proceed - take it, leave it or grill it with some mushrooms and a white pudding, it's up to you guys.

jay pettitt on 15/2/2003 at 22:41

for my two pennies worth I reckon it would be sad to loose ye oldy posts on ttlg. The grounds being that you don't know what you've got till its gone, oooh sha la la la. TTLG kind of has a provervbial finger in the heritage business. Unfortunately I don't have a cunning solution. Good luck getting it all sorted though; I'm missing my favourite websites.

madphilb on 15/2/2003 at 22:58

The Internet RayTracing Competition sells CDs with the images and movies from the competition. Possibly this could be one way to gather support.

I know from doing some recent downloads of Theif levels that it would take more than one disk for all of them.... and it would be good to include DarkLoader on the disk as well (BTW - hats off to the writers of that Gem!).

PHIL

Xenomorph on 15/2/2003 at 23:14

Quote:

Originally posted by sailoreagle
Peer-to-peer system, direct download server... hmm, smells like filehosting to me. :p

Yes, they do filehost. However, TTLG could always trying actually getting hosted by them. Or at least the forums hosted, since that's what seems to be the biggest problem right now.

sailoreagle on 16/2/2003 at 11:57

Xenomorph- I doubt anybody here would like to see ad-full forums... and what are you, the spokesperson for filefront? <small>With that homepage, it's pretty obvious...</small>

madphilb- (http://www.keepofmetalandgold.com/) you can get FM CDs there. It is however expressely forbidden by DromEd's use license to actually sell FMs - all you can do is make people play for postage and materials to make the CDs, which is what Komag does.

Ekim- I agree, that would be a good thing to have. People donate more if their donation does something good and they know it.

Xenomorph on 19/2/2003 at 20:24

It's a long shot, but another possibility would be (www.d3fx.com)
They host clans and such, so you might be able to get the forums hosted there.

Ekim on 21/2/2003 at 16:05

Argh, third party forum servers usually means major changes or even permenant loss of forums with no warning whatsoever.

I restate my former post - provide a clear, quotable reference to how much is needed and how much has been raised (I saw Sailoreagle quoting $2000 - is this authoritative?) and let us go steal, beg, steal, borrow and steal to raise the money.

Gingerbread Man on 21/2/2003 at 18:14

To the best of my knowledge (having talked to Saam and read some things that networking dudes have said to him) $2000 is a pretty good ballpark for the kind of thing we need. I'm not 100% sure how things stand at the new host, but from what I gather we're looking at needing either a hardware firewall or a heavier router, as the main problem we're facing is that the firewall / router combo just gets stuffed up doing double-duty.

We have received a flurry of donations in the past week totalling $158, so that's a good start, and thanks to everyone who donated. :D

I'll see if I can pry Saam away from his job for a few minutes so he can give some perfectly authoritative info.

As far as hosting goes, we're not looking at anything like that. And hopefully we never will.

(edit)

Alternatively, I could just do this:

Quote:

Originally posted by Saam at (http://thief.math.uh.edu/forum/viewtopic.php?t=33&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0) Jason's Forums

Hi guys,

Thanks for being so patient with us, and for keeping your interest. Here's the situation, for you network people:

The router I am currently using is a Cisco 2524, 16MB dram, 8MB flash memory. The router is also doing NAT/DHCP duties as well for my LAN.

When TTLG is plugged in, the CPU utilization on the router (the IP Input process) goes upwards to 60-100% and kills the router. When I unplug it, the utilization goes down to 10%.

I don't know what a clear solution to this is -- to either get a better Cisco router or to get a separate firewall. I have looked into the Sonic Pro 230, which runs around $1800, which will ease the load on the router and do the NAT'ing and stuff on its own. Yeah, the PIX firewall would be a bit overkill.

Or, get a better router since the 2500's aren't that strong.

Any advice?

Also, I just did some searching on some newsgroups and saw that there might be a solution with my current hardware, and that is to enable Fast-switching on same-interface. problem is, I dont know how to enable that on my router, so if any of you guys knows anything about Cisco routers, please email me at [email]saam@icode.com[/email].

If I can get that enabled, a lot of people have said that it can fix the problem I have (high CPU utilization on the IP Input process).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

FrenchToast on 6/3/2003 at 19:22

Maybe a solution to the pruning problem that would satisfy most users would be to actually prune old messages but to keep them available to users in the form of zipped text files ? that way anybody interested could download those (since file downloading, as stated, is not a problem) and read or perform a search on them as needed?

FT