Sweden site shutdown

Linkoping University, our gracious host in Sweden that has been providing the bandwidth for our Sweden, and master, site for 6 years has just asked us to remove all the 'objectionable' content from our server there, or to simply shut down the site. Unfortunately, politics, and the public appearance of LIU, comes into play here.

Given that finding and suppressing all the 'objectionable material' would be a mammoth task and, more importantly, is against the very purpose of the VCL, we have decided to simply shut down the Sweden site within the next day or so, and seek alternate hosting.

This is very unfortunate, but we definitely thank LIU, and the ctrl-c computer club, for their assistance and generosity in providing VCL a home for the past 6 years.

So... what now? Here's our current plan of attack:

- Tonight we will be redirecting all artist directory queries to the US site. The upload facilities and vcl forum will remain on the Sweden site.

- Once that's done, I'll work on moving the artist upload tools, and our own administration tools, to the US site, and, once working, redirect queries sent to the Sweden site to the US site instead. That will effectively make the US site the 'master'.

- I'll be seeking alternate mirror opportunities (If you've got a T1 to spare, write us!) I did want to wait until I had fixed the mirroring code, since it's very inefficient at the moment, but... we can't wait now :) I'll also be talking to the existing US site provider to see if I can get a bandwidth allotment increase on the existing machine, or simply buy a new machine, there.

Until I get another mirror running, the US site will be slow, since we're already hitting our monthly bandwidth allotment. I've put in traffic control, since the overage charges are expensive.


So... I hope folk can bare with us while we make our move. Getting free bandwidth from LIU was fantastic, but wasn't meant to last forever. Thank you, LIU.

Friday evening (PST) UPDATE: After a couple of failed experiments using the Coral network, we've got a second machine running at the US site. Instead of a being another mirror, it's been configured as a cache-proxy, and the first US site routes all images and thumbnails that appear on the New* pages through the 2nd machine instead. This has improved the speed at the US site markedly. So... the heat's off for a little while, and I'll spend the time transferring over the database functions from the sweden to the US site. Ie, artists will upload directly to the US, rather than the silly thing we have going now.

Sunday Evening Update: Seems that the Sweden site was talking up a LOT of workload... the addition of a second machine at the US site (just to get its bandwidth chunk, since they don't sell the bandwidth by itself) wasn't enough. I've ordered yet another server, and I'll configure both the 2nd and 3rd servers as a distributed delivery system for ALL the VCL content. Leaving the 1st machine to deliver just the HTML pages. And... that OUGHT to do it. That'll be a total of 9Mbits/sec, or 3TBytes/month. Holy crap!

Once we get a mirror network going again (and that will take a bit of doing - noone seems to have spare T2s (6Mbits/sec) lying around - we can decide to shut down one or both of the additional servers. (managed.com are quite cool in that regard)


Again, thank you all for your patience and support.