awgamer wrote:

Follow protocol is more important than content? Seems backwards.

No no no, it's not like that!!

When you use the FTP service, you upload to a staging area that only you can see, then when you go through the procedure to process them, they get added to the DB and copied to permanent storage for the world to see. It gives you the opportunity to 1. delete and re-upload if something goes wrong, and 2. give the file a proper title and description before it goes public.

The trouble is that the staging area is periodically cleaned up by an automated process once the files have been there for 24 hours.

I'm looking to see if maybe the files were captured in the weekly site backup, but it's not looking positive.

Thanks for explaining the situation.

Gentlemen! (And ladies! If there are any of you??)

The time has come to change hosting providers.

We're currently on plain old shared hosting. While it's been good, and fast, we're coming up against things like over-enthusiastic virus protection that we can't disable, a fairly rigid system for FTP accounts, and a shared IP meaning no SSL.

So, can anybody suggest a reasonably priced VPS hosting company?

Would it be a bad idea to combine with the Vogonswiki hosting?

How much data needs to be hosted?

Malvineous wrote:

Would it be a bad idea to combine with the Vogonswiki hosting?

How much data needs to be hosted?

There's over 35GB.

Doesn't matter though, I've found a host. Might take me a while to migrate us though.

Honestly if a few of us get gig fiber to the home we could do our own hosting.

Hell, hosting a website on old hardware just FEELS right.

I'm making the site read-only for a little while, as I move it to the new hosting location.

When it comes back up, all your logins will be the same. If my calculations are correct, this should be pretty seamless.

(Yes, I do have a local backup on my PC and on my NAS!)

In the mean time I'm spending some spare time creating ISOs from the driver disks that appear to not have been uploaded yet (or I just missed it or it's not important enough to upload), the 'downtime' will give me more time to finish creating the ISO files and write proper content lists and perhaps even find my scanner and scan the disks so I can 'attach' the image to the correct ISO (I think this greatly helps having an overview).

Cheers for all your work, SquallStrife 😀

edit:
Here's a list of some of the driver CDs I could upload, unless someone has a good reason for me in any particular CDROM not being uploaded (for instance if it makes no sense because it will never get used).

3DFX: Quick Install / The Voodoo Driver Installation CD (W95/98 driver) / DX7 / DirectX Media (no idea what this is) // Version 1.3 / Multi-lingual Version
TerraTec Home Cinema / Applications and Drivers / H5 (Don't actually know yet if uploading this one would make sense, but it mentions TerraTec so I'm asking now 😜
ABIT / GT-1.31M // User's Manual (dunno what exactly, will check tomorrow) / Drivers / Hardware Monitor
ASUS P2B/P2B-F 440BX AGPset Mainboard / Support CD Rev 4.08 // ASUS PC Probe Rev 1.3 // M066 (possibly some ASUS CD version number) / Copyright 1998
VGA Card Driver // V2.2 / W95/98 // Multimedia (Came in a blanc cardboard CDROM thingy with handwritten remarks which include 3DFX, possibly some kind of collection of random graphics cards drivers, will check tomorrow)
Sound Blaster AudioPCI 128 // P/N 2201ML0002049
3D Graphics Accelerator // NVIDIA Series: RIVA TNT2, GF2 MX, GF2 Pro, GF2 Ultra, Savage4, Savage3D, Trio3D2X // VGA Driver / VGA BIOS Flash Utility / User's Manual
Sound Blaster 16 Value PnP (OEM version, cardboard paper sleeve mentions W95, W3.1, DOS and "SOFTWARE SUITE")
Creative Sound Blaster CD 64 (OEM, W95 SOFTWARE SUITE (WINDOWS 3.1 in English Only))
ATI RADEON // ATI_052609, The sleeve has hand written "HD4670 AGP" in my handwriting and my card was very stable, might be worth uploading this driver disk?
ATI Software Release 107 (mentions it includes drivers, software utilities and "Multimedia Center", the paper sleeve feels very luxurious (bit silk-like or something) and is still sealed)
3 x Sapphire driver disks, versions 12-026, 12-081, 13-016. The latter 2 mention specifically they are for XP and up)

These below I already created ISOs for, the TX97 disk was basically just to practice 😜
ASUS TX97 Smart Motherboard / Support CD Rev. 3.02 / LDCM Demonstration Video (MPEG 1)
GAMUT 2000 SOFTWARE (contains drivers for Solo-1 and ALS4000 PCI sound cards)
DIAMOND SuperCD 3/98 (Seems to be a newer version than the 2 Diamond disk packages I saw on Vogonsdrivers, year 1998, seems to contain drivers up to V550 and seems to include cards like Stealth II G460, Sonic Impact, some 3DFX 3D accelerators (V2 and Banshee), Stealth S220 drivers, some more)

My pleasure, as always! 😀

I've cut over the site to the new server. Please let me know how you all get on for performance. Still read-only at this stage.

We're also HTTPS enabled now! Try https://www.vogonsdrivers.com

Also when FTP is available again, it'll be complete with SSL encryption.

So we've been on the new server now for about a week. How is everyone finding the performance?

If it's satisfactory then I'll go ahead and do the work to switch uploads back on.

Performance looks good from my side of the world.
I downloaded some files and it was pretty great - an average speed between 350 and 425 kb/s

I *think* I found uploading to be a little slower, but I never took any measurements of the old FTP server to compare. 🙁

Stiletto wrote:

I *think* I found uploading to be a little slower, but I never took any measurements of the old FTP server to compare. 🙁

That could just be down to the physical location, but I'll keep an eye on it.

I've got a lot of original drivers CD from motherboards, soundcards, graphic cards you name it and i want to contribute to vogons drivers. 😊
Most of them are old like the original AWE64 CD, Matrox cd, chaintech motherboards, compaq rescue cds, etc...

Where can i do that and where do i upload content to?

How can i create an account to upload stuff there

SquallStrife wrote:

When you use the FTP service, you upload to a staging area that only you can see, then when you go through the procedure to process them, they get added to the DB and copied to permanent storage for the world to see. It gives you the opportunity to 1. delete and re-upload if something goes wrong, and 2. give the file a proper title and description before it goes public.

The trouble is that the staging area is periodically cleaned up by an automated process once the files have been there for 24 hours.

Does the 24 hour clock start only after the upload is finished? I ask because my internet is slow, and if I were to upload something huge, I can imagine it taking 24 hours to finish.
It's been forever since I used FTP - I don't suppose there's some means of resuming an incomplete upload, is there?

shamino wrote:

SquallStrife wrote:

When you use the FTP service, you upload to a staging area that only you can see, then when you go through the procedure to process them, they get added to the DB and copied to permanent storage for the world to see. It gives you the opportunity to 1. delete and re-upload if something goes wrong, and 2. give the file a proper title and description before it goes public.

The trouble is that the staging area is periodically cleaned up by an automated process once the files have been there for 24 hours.

Does the 24 hour clock start only after the upload is finished? I ask because my internet is slow, and if I were to upload something huge, I can imagine it taking 24 hours to finish.
It's been forever since I used FTP - I don't suppose there's some means of resuming an incomplete upload, is there?

Under the old system, it was 24 hours from the midnight following the account being created.

Under the new system, I don't envisage needing to use such a system, so it won't be a problem. The passwords will still expire after 24 hours, but the files will be retained.

paulo_becas wrote:

I've got a lot of original drivers CD from motherboards, soundcards, graphic cards you name it and i want to contribute to vogon […]
Show full quote

I've got a lot of original drivers CD from motherboards, soundcards, graphic cards you name it and i want to contribute to vogons drivers. 😊
Most of them are old like the original AWE64 CD, Matrox cd, chaintech motherboards, compaq rescue cds, etc...

Where can i do that and where do i upload content to?

How can i create an account to upload stuff there

I'm not creating new accounts right now while I deal with the site migration (and relevant PHP code changes to how some aspects operate).

In the meantime, it would be great if you could go through what you have and check whether we actually have it already or not. One of the reasons the site was created was to have an organised collection with no redundant copies of the same thing (like some other DriverGuide sites! 😜).

For instance, we already have some AWE64 driver CDs. We probably don't need another one unless it's significantly different to what's already there.

SquallStrife wrote:

I'm not creating new accounts right now while I deal with the site migration (and relevant PHP code changes to how some aspects operate).

In the meantime, it would be great if you could go through what you have and check whether we actually have it already or not. One of the reasons the site was created was to have an organised collection with no redundant copies of the same thing (like some other DriverGuide sites! 😜).

For instance, we already have some AWE64 driver CDs. We probably don't need another one unless it's significantly different to what's already there.

Ok, then i'll wait.
I do have a lot of CDs that are not present there and i agree with you about the organization. I don't intend to upload nothing that's already there.
I know i can help and there's no site that have this kind of stuff organized.
Your idea about vogonsdrivers is just very welcome.
I'm very pleased with your fórum, and it works really well.

My personal thank you for your work and everybody involved

Hi all!!

I have good news and bad news.

The good news is that I've re-enabled logins. Yay! Please log in and test things as best you can, uploading, editing, etc.

FTP is now dropped in favour of secure, encrypted SFTP. Everything else is the same, just make sure to put sftp:// in front of the host name in FileZilla, so it uses the correct protocol. Oh, and the @vogonsdrivers.com is dropped from usernames. Woo!

The bad news is that I'm still not creating new accounts just yet. I want existing people to test it for a bit so I can fix any outstanding bugs before resuming normal operation. Sorry!! But it won't be long now I promise!

In the meantime, could you please run a quick purge over the uploads "flagged or deletion" ?
Thanks in advance.

Jolaes76 wrote:

In the meantime, could you please run a quick purge over the uploads "flagged or deletion" ?
Thanks in advance.

Done