Make this forum and RepRap.org faster, You can help!

ChipIn to ship donated servers and hardware to make this forum and RepRap.org faster.

I did not set this up, just doing my part and spreading the good word.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/10/2013 10:30PM by akenvim.

We just contributed the remaining amount needed! Yay new server!

Chelsea - QU-BD

So, two questions seem pertinent:

1: Who has set this up? The chipin site has barely any information saying who is responsible, who is taking the money, etc. As far as I can see no-one from the RepRap project has even mentioned this.

2: How on earth will $150 remotely help set up a new server?


I think your efforts would be better put to use trying to convince the admins of this forum to actually maintain it, rather than sending money to a dubious site.

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garyhodgson.com/reprap | reprap.development-tracker.info | thingtracker.net

First, thanks for getting active.

I think you miss an important point, though. The problem here isn't a slow server, but the lack of server administration.

And how would $150 help? With this amount you can pay 3 hours of server administration or 1 month of server hosting. What'll happen next month?

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

garyhodgson Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> 1: Who has set this up? The chipin site has
> barely any information saying who is responsible,
> who is taking the money, etc. As far as I can see
> no-one from the RepRap project has even mentioned
> this.
>
> 2: How on earth will $150 remotely help set up a
> new server?
>
>I think your efforts would be better put to use
> trying to convince the admins of this forum to
> actually maintain it, rather than sending money to
> a dubious site.

This was an original post from Reddit by user sgraber. However, that post too lacked information to address your concerns, which are valid. Strangely, A commenter of that post made a link to this post, insinuating more information would be provided. If anyone from Reddit is reading this, we know as much as you do.

> 2: How on earth will $150 remotely help set up a new server?

AFAIK, the money is not to buy new servers, it is used to pay for the shipping of donated servers and hardware, as said by the ChipIn page.

> trying to convince the admins of this forum to
> actually maintain it, rather than sending money to
> a dubious site.

You made a very valid point and got me worrying as my intentions we to help boost this site's speed. I did a little internet detective work and it seems that ChipIn has a long history (for an internet site), way back to 2006. It looks like they work similar to Kickstarter in the sense of crowded funded projects. Surprisingly, they preceded Kickstarter, which launched 3 years later in 2009!

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/11/2013 06:09AM by akenvim.

Ok guys, I just woke up and saw all the activity around this! Holy cow, you all work fast!

To clear the air, let me explain a bit. I've emailed a few times asking how we as a community could do to help the problem of poor performance on the site/forum/wiki and I did finally get a response from Dr. Bowyer himself. He explained that it wasn't a matter of money to throw at more bandwidth, but it was a matter of hardware/shared hosting/etc.. and recommended that mirroring the server across the globe would be his version of how to help. So, me not being the uber-geek, and not ever setting up a mirrored site etc... before, I just kinda let it pass, and accepted that browsing the wiki and forums would forever be sloooow. However, the last few days on the #reprap IRC have had a few people talking about doing something! User glen2 has put together a plan to improve the situation. You can read all about it on the WIKI page he created for the project. After watching two days of pretty good sounding conversations about it, I decided to help DO something, and contacted glen2 to offer up some of our unused equipment for the project. So, I gave him a list of what servers we had, and told him we'd donate the servers to the cause. He said he'd need to see about how to raise some funds for shipping and other hrdwr etc... to setup/maintain it, so i showed him a site that I've used in the past to collect donations for projects, the chipin.com site. And in a matter of 60 seconds, a lot of the guys on the IRC channel jumped on it!

I know some guys on the IRC are not so sure that this is the best idea, and they have some valid concerns, but here's my personal take on the situation. From everything i've heard and seen, this is not a 2 week process. Glen2 is going to set up the server at the datacenter and get it up as a running new.reprpap.org site, and let everyone start beating it up, and if it works better/faster/stronger, THEN it would become the Plan A, but there's still going to be the Plan B, as the failsafe, and that's to roll back to what we are already using/doing?

I think that anythingthat can help improve the situation is a positive, and worries aside, speculation etc... are valid concerns, but I doubt the 'powers that be' wouldn't push it to a new setup without doing their end and making sure they are comfortable with it. So, just to clear it up, we are donating the servers, the community is helping pay for the initial costs/setup, and glen2 and his help in London would be admin'ing it.

Hope that clears up the confusion

HOOORAY!

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- akhlut

Just remember - Iterate, Iterate, Iterate!

[myhomelessmind.blogspot.com]

SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!

I've been given the taks of leading this project to to promised land of CPU cycles and bandwidth.

The current site is running on an old shard server, Apache never has free resources so pages can take over 60 seconds to render, we believe a Raspberry Pi on a home internet connection wold be an improvement.

I was chosen to do this as the IRC channel was angered by the impression the sites gives of the project so I was put forward to negotiate with Dr Adrian Bowyer as I'm a native english speaker and have worked as a systems administrator for a number of international companies.

A data center was chosen in London as it's cheaper then cloud hosting or space in American server farms, the chosen location is close to a number of Reprap people with sysadmin jobs who can change disks or put in new hardware.

A server was bought of Amazon and installed into the Safehost datacenter on Friday the 11th of January.
[www.amazon.co.uk]
[178.239.162.66] (No, you can not have root access)

This server is on loan, the Reprap project need to rase the money to buy a server and pay the monthly hosting fees, if we run a Thingiverse clone we'll need a pool of cash for more servers.
Free server hardware offered for this project were rejected as they were so large and power hungry, the hosting costs would be greater then the cost of a new server after one year.

These are the monthly hosting costs:
Rack space £15/per U
Power - £25 per 0.5A
100Mb Port - £25 per server or
1000Mb Port - £45 per server (we have this option, uncapped)
IP4 at £1
Then add 20% UK VAT.

So the Reprap project need £85 per month just to keep a dedicated server running. Begging every month when the rent is due won't give us any security. I've contacted the fund raiser of the openBSD project, they sell CDs and branded clothes to cover their costs and have enough left over to pay developers to work full time and pay for a presence at conferences.

If anyone know how to set-up accounts for a project like this please get in touch.
If anyone knows if we can be a charity to avoid tax let me know that also.
The Reprap Cafepress site hasn't been updated since 2007, so new artwork suitable for t-shirts would be appreciated.

Hi Glen2,

Thanks for the update, and I applaud your efforts to actually do something about this problem!

The only suggestion I can make right away is: if there was a way to donate to the funds, and be sure that the funds are actually used for the intended purpose, then I believe many would happily donate. As you rightly say, this alone wouldn't provide the security necessary, but it would certainly help. So long as I can trust that my donation is not being misappropriated I would certainly do so.

I would also ask what kind of revenues the reprap project have from other channels, e.g. advertising, and whether parts of these should be utilised.

Cheers,
Gary

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garyhodgson.com/reprap | reprap.development-tracker.info | thingtracker.net

Who are the various admins of the new site? How will they be contacted?

Why is OpenBSD being chosen? That greatly limits the number of potential admins. Debian or similar is widely known, but far fewer people know OpenBSD. It limits the pool of admins without many benefits, afaict.

Nobody said anything about the server running oBSD. Just that they might want to look at how oBSD fundraises to host their servers.

The forums have only been this slow for a few months. Has there been a step change in the number of visitors? If anything I would say there has been a marked reduction in the number of posts per day since Christmas, Maybe because it has got so slow.

Didn't Tekwizard report it was always fast for him? How can it be fast for some and slow for others if it is a server problem?

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

I think it says it all about this forum that the "decision" was taken on irc not on the forum and not even communicated on the forum. Server speed is not the only issue here, there is a need for reorganisation and improved admin (this isn't a complaint at the existing admin - I appreciate the size of the task and the barriers), but it does appear that some key people are unwilling to cede power to the masses. I really think that under the current approach and organisation the idea of RepRap hosting the new Thingiverse is a complete failure waiting to happen. Whatever you may think of Makerbot/Thingiverse's owners and their objectives they do a better job of managing what they have than we do here. The real question is are people prepared to move to a more professional approach (and delegate some real power to a team who could make something happen) or do we want to continue as a bunch of well meaning amateurs?

Does anybody know who the server admins are? VDX and myself are forum admins, but that is a very different thing.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

... there are some Wiki- and server-admins too - but they normally won't post in the forum, so this are two different areas ...

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Viktor
--------
Aufruf zum Projekt "Müll-freie Meere" - [reprap.org] -- Deutsche Facebook-Gruppe - [www.facebook.com]

Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]

Anyone here remember the Reprap Research Foundation? I happily donated to it before it became broken. If it became fixed, I would consider donating again.

Quote
garyhodgson
I would also ask what kind of revenues the reprap project have from other channels, e.g. advertising, and whether parts of these should be utilised.

Adrian addressed the topic of revenues in a message (Oct 25 2011) to the reprap-dev mailing list: Money

The RRRF seems to have been Zach Smith's baby, he is still described as Executive Director, before he abandoned it and created Makerbot, then got kicked out of Makerbot. Last seen hiking around China?

But it seems that one of the original goals of RRRF, to seed the market for materials and designs for Reprap builders has been taken over by the many small companies offering materials and creating innovative designs. There are also dozens of forums and sites where 3d printing development takes place apart from reprap.org.

Quote
nophead
The forums have only been this slow for a few months.

This forum as well as the wiki is still fast at times. Sometimes response times changes from minute to minute drastically.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of a new server is the fact it has to come with a new admin, who (hopefully) does look at performance from time to time and has the capability to take countermeasures for e.g. DNS issues, DoS spamming attacks or other unwanted bottlenecks.

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

I'm still trying to get my forum user name changed back to wildseyed LOL

I don't think admins exist.

It is always slow or very slow for me. From clicking on an RSS link it takes about 10 - 30 seconds to show the message. It has been like that for months.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

Hello All,

Thanks to Bill2or3 there have been some adjustments made to the RepRap server. There are more things that we can do, but we want to see what the improvements we have made achieve first.

Please let us know if you see an improvement or if you don't.

Feels much snappier now.

Hi Sally,

Definitely an improvement from my perspective - in fact I was taken by surprise when the page loaded so quickly to read you message!

Thanks Bill2or3!

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garyhodgson.com/reprap | reprap.development-tracker.info | thingtracker.net

Yep, definately faster ... thanks!
Infact I'd go as far as to say reprap.org is now as fast as any other site I visit, nice tweak! (whatever it was).
Cheers,
Robin.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/17/2013 08:20AM by Zedsquared.

I can't go and make a coffee between page requests any more!

SanjayM Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Nobody said anything about the server running
> oBSD. Just that they might want to look at how
> oBSD fundraises to host their servers.

[reprap.org]

"This would initially be a server farms 1Gb/second connection going to a HP proliant server (Donated by SeeMeCNC ), running openBSD and hosting Drupal content management system."

It is in the current version as well:

[reprap.org]

Looks like Bill2or3 did hit the right spot. Everything fast for several days now.

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

Yes, Seems to be actually usable again now, I had just started using Google+ RepRap and 3Dprinting as an alternative news fix to the pain of this forum.

Do check out the G+ communities, they have some great stuff going on. The RepRap one only has 180 people at the moment, the 3D printing one has 9147

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[richrap.blogspot.com]

Quote

Do check out the G+ communities, they have some great stuff going on.

*sigh* Yet more diversification. In case you want something from me, stay here.

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY