Melbourne
It’s scary how often I refreshed to see if Pinside was up again... I’m completely hooked!! Well done Robin xo
(Topic ID: 291292)
Montreal, QC
I had so many pinball questions while you were down, don’t ever leave me again! Your outage really did shine a light on exactly how important you are to this community. Thank you for all you do...I will keep donating. If you keep doing what you do.
Quoted from ToucanF16:I can’t match the old timers, but where do you find the streak rating?
Pinside community tab and scroll down.
Mcdonough, GA
Quoted from d0n:HUH
[Personal info removed]
WTF RU talking about
You don't even own any pinball games. You're just here to fleece the community with your overpriced crap. You were going to retire from selling us crap back in 2014. https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/time-to-retire-from-pinball-inc-ramp-manufacturing-its-been-a-blast but you're still selling it here?
Huge no-no to post personal information as a bullying tactic, especially my mother's name. That makes your ad hominem attacks about our hundreds of products made from original Bally/Williams tooling; while being one of the most affordable places on the internet completely fruitless. 
Please. DONATE wherever you can. Let’s help pinside to keep running. Less talk and more showing your love and support (monetary). Thanks Robin
Quoted from robin:Well, you all didn't take long to crash our temporary server. After 30-40 minutes it went down smoking. So I went back to the drawing board and ordered a brand new server. This should work, but please bear with me as I will be tweaking and tuning some more over the next week(s). The upside is that the new server is twice as powerful as the previous one, so with the right approach this could all end better than it started.
Anyways, if you're able to read this: welcome back!
Thanks for all the hard work to get our drug back 
It was a rough week! I actually had to do actual work in my office!!!! 
's-hertogenbosch
dont worry too much about what should have been, you did great under the circumstances Robin, thanks for your hard work
Quoted from MrSanRamon:At the expense of being down voted...
This shows how fragile a site hosted by an individual is. Maybe it will be better now.
What if Robin decides to quit, or he gets sick, or even worse passes away, or something else that causes him to stop hosting.
What happens then? What if no one comes forward to take on the task of hosting, do all of the threads disappear?
Granted probably 80% of the posts aren't that important for posterity... all the posts for what the next game from CGC is and when is it coming out, etc.
But there are a number of threads that help people with trouble shooting and repairs that I would hate to lose.
Wouldn't want Pinside to go the way of RGP.
Just some thoughts.
Robert
Quoted from Compy:I don't think this calls for a downvote. You're asking some very very good questions. I have businesses that are centered around pinside for sales, and as such, we donate or pay marketplace fees to them for the audience. We will absolutely continue to do so. It just reinforces the fact that we need diversity of both a web frontend and the pinside marketplace to sell our product.
Some things, like "ordering a new server" this day and age for a site that is one (or many) people's primary source of income is still one hell of a head scratcher for me. Especially when cloud offerings exist that solve (lack of) redundancy issues. But hey, everyone's a site reliability engineer in hindsight The good news is we all learn and move on!
-- Jimmy
This is pure nonsense. “Clouds” are not magical beings and the companies that run them are not very good. I am GLAD Robin doesn’t “wh*re out” Pinside to Amazon or Google.
Also all this talk of an “individual hosting a website” WTF? Robin doesn’t run this site from his house. Can you imagine if we were all hammering a tiny server in someone’s house in the Netherlands? We’d be covering his entire towns heating bills!
I’m confident in Robin and I’m sure he’s got plans in place in case something were to happen to him. His commitment to privacy is amazing and I think folks here just gloss over it and take it for granted.
We live in an age where ALL YOUR PHOTOS on the “Google Cloud” are scanned and analyzed by Google. All your photos backed up by Amazon are deemed “their property”.
On Pinside your stuff belongs to you. Your PMs are private and your emails and contact info is private.
Robin could probably make a ton by selling all our info if he wanted. He’s committed to this hobby and to us! I thank him for what he does, and his brother too! You guys are incredible.
Maybe I misunderstood you, but I think I read that the data-center used WATER SPRINKLERS?!?!?!?!
What. the. actual. -(profanity deleted)-!!!!! Any date center that does that shouldn't be a data center!!!!
If that was true, you need to change data-centers ASAP to someplace that knows what HALON Suppression
is used for. Stowing the server in a towel closet [Removed] would have been safer....
I'm Glad everything is getting better and grateful for all the hard work you do for us Robin... THANK YOU!!!
uOcsyp (resized).png
Quoted from Isochronic_Frost:This is pure nonsense. “Clouds” are not magical beings and the companies that run them are not very good. I am GLAD Robin doesn’t “wh*re” out Pinside to Amazon or Google.
Also all this talk of an “individual hosting a website” WTF? Robin doesn’t run this site from his house. Can you imagine if we were all hammering a tiny server in someone’s house in the Netherlands? We’d be covering his entire towns heating bills!
I’m confident in Robin and I’m sure he’s got plans in place in case something were to happen to him. His commitment to privacy is amazing and I think folks here just gloss over it and take it for granted.
We live in an age where ALL YOUR PHOTOS on the “Google Cloud” are scanned and documents by Google. All your photos backed up by Amazon are deemed “their property”.
On Pinside your stuff belongs to you. Your PMs are private and your emails and contact info is private.
Robin could probably make a ton by selling all our info if he wanted. He’s committed to this hobby and to us! I thank him for what he does, and his brother too! You guys are incredible.
I don't use clouds, Apple nor Google. SD card is good enough for me.
Quoted from Compy:I don't think this calls for a downvote. You're asking some very very good questions. I have businesses that are centered around pinside for sales, and as such, we donate or pay marketplace fees to them for the audience. We will absolutely continue to do so. It just reinforces the fact that we need diversity of both a web frontend and the pinside marketplace to sell our product.
Some things, like "ordering a new server" this day and age for a site that is one (or many) people's primary source of income is still one hell of a head scratcher for me. Especially when cloud offerings exist that solve (lack of) redundancy issues. But hey, everyone's a site reliability engineer in hindsight The good news is we all learn and move on!
-- Jimmy
Cloud hosting has its own problems. I work with AWS and Azure and I’ve seen plenty of outages and disasters in both commercial and federal clouds. It’s also not always cost effective versus hosting yourself.
Robin could still implement redundancy (or more feasibly, failover) and still host himself. There’s also plenty of backup strategies for backing up a forum like this to S3 or Azure Storage.
Quoted from radium:Cloud hosting has its own problems. I work with AWS and Azure and I’ve seen plenty of outages and disasters in both commercial and federal clouds. It’s also not always cost effective versus hosting yourself.
Robin could still implement redundancy (or more feasibly, failover) and still host himself. There’s also plenty of backup strategies for backing up a forum like this to S3 or Azure Storage.
Couldn't agree more! My point that "everyone is an SRE" was also geared toward my own comments. It's easy to look at the aftermath and point things out. No doubt that in certain workloads, hardware servers could be more cost effective, and I bet that's where Robin has the most experience. Many times its about using the stack you know.
Very well stated
Quoted from Isochronic_Frost:This is pure nonsense. “Clouds” are not magical beings and the companies that run them are not very good. I am GLAD Robin doesn’t “wh*re” out Pinside to Amazon or Google.
Also all this talk of an “individual hosting a website” WTF? Robin doesn’t run this site from his house. Can you imagine if we were all hammering a tiny server in someone’s house in the Netherlands? We’d be covering his entire towns heating bills!
I’m confident in Robin and I’m sure he’s got plans in place in case something were to happen to him. His commitment to privacy is amazing and I think folks here just gloss over it and take it for granted.
We live in an age where ALL YOUR PHOTOS on the “Google Cloud” are scanned and documents by Google. All your photos backed up by Amazon are deemed “their property”.
On Pinside your stuff belongs to you. Your PMs are private and your emails and contact info is private.
Robin could probably make a ton by selling all our info if he wanted. He’s committed to this hobby and to us! I thank him for what he does, and his brother too! You guys are incredible.
For the most part, I completely agree. My angle with ordering a server being a head scratcher was mostly just because it's not something I've really had to consider recently. Though, your points are more relevant than ever, and I think very well put. I have nothing but love for the sheer engineering effort it takes to run a site like this and all of the custom code that makes a forum experience this seamless.
Azure is normally pretty solid, but man is it expensive. I can understand going with a lower-cost provider.
You need to upload the site to the Cloud if you contact me I can connect you with some CLOUD developers who can do that for you.
Quoted from ToucanF16:I can’t match the old timers, but where do you find the streak rating?
Look here: https://pinside.com/pinball/community
Scroll down a bit...
Copenhagen
Great effort recovering the server and site Robin. Being in IT for over 25 years, I know first hand what you’ve been dealing with and it’s a nightmare. I take multiple layers of backups and snapshots now: database, file and VM level including continuous replication of backups to BLOB cloud storage. Having dealt with several major disaster recovery scenarios such as yours before, I assume anything can happen now and prepare for it. Those wet sprinklers above my servers make me very nervous too...sad that many IT rooms still use this form of fire suppression in 2021.
Thanks for bringing Pinside back online, we really appreciate it. I still cringe remembering the days of RGP newsgroups and how primitive that was.
-Jeremy
Saint-Étienne
Friston
I didn't quite realise how much I read pinside daily until it was taken away, it was horrible going through withdrawal sympoms, lol.
I had to re-draw a schematic to keep myself amused instead of reading Pinside. sigh.
Great work getting the site back up and running and thank you for all you do Robin.
Quoted from radium:Cloud hosting has its own problems. I work with AWS and Azure and I’ve seen plenty of outages and disasters in both commercial and federal clouds. It’s also not always cost effective versus hosting yourself.
Robin could still implement redundancy (or more feasibly, failover) and still host himself. There’s also plenty of backup strategies for backing up a forum like this to S3 or Azure Storage.
Working on getting my Microsoft 365 Expert certification. We are moving as many clients to M365 and Azure AD as we can. We also use Azure services like Intune, Power Apps, and PowerBI internally to our company. I don't use cloud storage personally, at least to host private data. Too many security and privacy concerns. I maintain my local backups on hard drives, optical discs, and tapes.
Glad that Pinside is back! I'm sure I didn't help the temporary server with my constant checks to see if things were up and running; I just could not stay away. And I considered this a sign that I should quit procrastinating and pony up a few bucks for the greatest pinball resource on the face of the planet! Thanks Robin for this incredible resource, and thanks to all the other pinsiders on whom I have come to depend for insights, tips, and more!
Quoted from GraySaint2006:Maybe I misunderstood you, but I think I read that the data-center used WATER SPRINKLERS?!?!?!?!
What. the. actual. -(profanity deleted)-!!!!! Any date center that does that shouldn't be a data center!!!!
If that was true, you need to change data-centers ASAP to someplace that knows what HALON Suppression
is used for. Stowing the server in a towel closet like Hillery Clinton's email server would have been safer....
I'm Glad everything is getting better and grateful for all the hard work you do for us Robin... THANK YOU!!!
[quoted image]
You can't buy halon anymore (*for all intents and purposes*). There are some replacements, but they are big bucks. Most places decide that you just take the water route because its cheap and easy. Its probably cheaper to just order some new servers for the ones that got ruined (you had backups right????!!!?). That's what insurance is for. The question is, will WebNX recover or will customers run. Its a rare event, but they handled it VERY poorly if you ask me.
For those recommending AWS, they go down too. Everyone does. This kind of event is pretty rare though thankfully. The fact that Robin had backups that were only ~2 hours old is awesome. At my work, our RPO (recovery point objective) is 24 hours (we backup once a day) except our databases which is 1 hour.
Quoted from Isochronic_Frost:Those people are clueless, they all kept saying it’s a personal server when WebNX is a professional outfit who goofed up hard lol.
The Facebook peanut gallery proved they are toxic af.No thanks, Amazon doesn’t need to own the last free half % of the Internet.
Maybe I should have put it another way. Implementing a multi region solution (which is simple on AWS) provides redundancy if there is a DC outage.
Donated again. I appreciate the site...and also appreciate the high cost of implementing a true BCDR solution, even if only for a server or two...hard to even justify I'm sure....for a pinball website. But glad it's being looked at/implemented.
My DTs are finally subsiding...
Sooo glad to see everything is back! And thanks once again to Robin for all of his continuing hard work!
I wouldn't recommend AWS. They have been known to cut off your hosting for various reasons.
Added over 3 years ago:If they don't like what you have to say, or feel your site competes with one of their partners, they inject their politics and cut off your hosting.
I have no issue with AWS and all backups are duplicated in many locations so should never have an issue with one server burning down, just launch a new instance on another server.
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