The World "Behind" SDA

2012-10-13 04:45:30 am

Borderlands 2 Glitch Hunter/ router.

I was just sat down Avin' a good ol' Cup of rosy lee [that's a cup of tea BTW if you not English] And i was wondering whats behind what we can see of SDA, namely the hardware, who owns that hardware (whether its a rented server or a self owned sever of an SDA member) and what the general cost is month to month (both time and money).

also what general stuff is done on a daily, weekly, monthly basis just to keep this place going both the showroom (the front page) and the janitors closet notice board (the forums :P)

This was just out of random interest i work as an industrial server builder @ Captec so I'm kind of geeky towards this stuff lol I don't mind if you wish to keep information secret. Wink

Thread title:

bangerra

2012-10-13 08:32:09 am

It's A Spy!!

Breakdown

2012-10-13 08:47:32 am

Haters gonna hate

1000 monkeys at 1000 typewriters

PJ

2012-10-13 08:59:19 am

Is PJ

I thought it was 1000 monkeys at 10 typewriters.

MAS8705

2012-10-13 09:50:54 am

SDA Apprentice -- (3-1)

I was going to post Frezy_man shirtless or ripping his shirt off, but since I can't seem to find it, I'll post this instead.

nate

Edit history:

nate: 2012-10-13 10:38:29 am

2012-10-13 10:29:48 am

i built it.

ARK 4U-500-CA case
corsair CMPSU-750HX power supply
ASUS Z8NA-D6C motherboard
dual xeon E5620
Dynatron G785 cpu coolers
24 GB KVR1333D3E9S/4G ram
3 VTX3-25SAT3 120 GB solid state drives (1 boot/log disk, 2 in raid-0 for databases)
3 WD2003FYYS 2 TB hard drives

the only mistake i made was going for a high bandwidth colo when the front page needed high availability. i ran into several delays provisioning a vps to act as a caching front-end but hopefully i am close to having that done now.

edit: prior to the changeover to mikoto my monthly server bill was about $450 us. now it is $96. but mikoto cost me almost $3,000 to build so it will be a few more months before it comes back to me.

AlecK47

2012-10-13 10:58:56 am

I

Quote from MAS8705:

I was going to post Frezy_man shirtless or ripping his shirt off, but since I can't seem to find it, I'll post this instead.

I watched the Bayonetta run and I missed that? Sad

Oh well, at least I got to see it in the end. And holy crap, trihex was flat bustin'!

Alko

Edit history:

Alko: 2012-10-13 12:16:52 pm

2012-10-13 12:15:50 pm

Caution: This user contains Kana ^_^

Quote from MAS8705:

I was going to post Frezy_man shirtless or ripping his shirt off, but since I can't seem to find it, I'll post this instead.

You looking for this?

edit: How do I turn this into a link instead of an embedded vid?

DJS

2012-10-13 12:20:33 pm

torch slug since 2006

Quote from nate:

i built it.
etc etc

are you hosting it at home or some other cool place?

nate

2012-10-13 12:33:37 pm

http://fdcservers.net/

we don't have good home internet connections in the us.

Sir VG

2012-10-13 12:37:17 pm

Fucking Weeaboo

Quote from MAS8705:

I was going to post Frezy_man shirtless or ripping his shirt off, but since I can't seem to find it, I'll post this instead.

http://www.archive.org/download/ClassicGamesDoneQuick/ClassicGamesDoneQuick_part55_Contra.mp4

Jump to 18:45. This is the moment that will last forever in the history of SDA.

DJS

2012-10-13 12:39:07 pm

torch slug since 2006

Quote from nate:

http://fdcservers.net/

we don't have good home internet connections in the us.

oh right, forgot. seems kinda weird to me though, building a computer then sending it to some company. but i guess thats just the way it is!

UraniumAnchor

2012-10-13 12:42:32 pm

Not a walrus

clearly nate should move to Kansas City and take advantage of Google's fiber lines...

nate

2012-10-13 12:53:18 pm

can't say i haven't considered it. but i'm sure they have some shit in their tos that's like "if you run a server then we can shut you down". maybe i wouldn't get shut down right away but i can't deal with the uncertainty. would be like going back to shared hosting.

Pootrain

2012-10-13 01:30:27 pm

train kept rollin

These are an interesting look behind the scenes of early SDA.

http://m2k2.taigaforum.com/post/history_of_metroid_2002_part_1_was_happy_birthday_m2k2.html

UraniumAnchor

2012-10-13 01:36:28 pm

Not a walrus

Quote from nate:

can't say i haven't considered it. but i'm sure they have some shit in their tos that's like "if you run a server then we can shut you down". maybe i wouldn't get shut down right away but i can't deal with the uncertainty. would be like going back to shared hosting.

Looks like you're right...

Quote from google:

Your Google Fiber account is for your use and the reasonable use of your guests. Unless you have a written agreement with Google Fiber permitting you do so, you should not host any type of server using your Google Fiber connection, use your Google Fiber account to provide a large number of people with Internet access, or use your Google Fiber account to provide commercial services to third parties (including, but not limited to, selling Internet access to third parties).

Look at it this way, now you aren't tempted to move to Kansas City.

Judgy

2012-10-13 05:26:13 pm

Borderlands 2 Glitch Hunter/ router.

well that pretty much explained most of what i had to ask.

Good choice with dual Xeons thats what we use for dual socket boards (saying that i don't think there's any dual socket i3/5/7 boards released yet)
Was about to say its odd you have only 3 dimm slots (from your picture) then I realized your specs said 24GB using 4GB sticks meaning 6 slots lol

Your cabling would get me fired lol that's me being brain washed by my work place (and my own PC) I'm sure your airflow etc is fine how it is lol
MY Cleanfreak PC

Quote from Pootrain:

These are an interesting look behind the scenes of early SDA.

http://m2k2.taigaforum.com/post/history_of_metroid_2002_part_1_was_happy_birthday_m2k2.html

that was very interesting actually Poo thanks for the link.

well that pretty much explained most of what i had to ask.

Good choice with dual Xeons thats what we use for dual socket boards (saying that i don't think there's any dual socket i3/5/7 boards released yet)
Was about to say its odd you have only 3 dimm slots (from your picture) then I realized your specs said 24GB using 4GB sticks meaning 6 slots lol

Your cabling would get me fired lol that's me being brain washed by my work place (and my own PC) I'm sure your airflow etc is fine how it is lol
MY Cleanfreak PC
[hidden][IMG]http://i636.photobucket.com/albums/uu85/kedgetim/2012-10-1400-20-28736.jpg[/IMG][IMG]http://i636.photobucket.com/albums/uu85/kedgetim/2012-10-1400-20-01872.jpg[/IMG][IMG]http://i636.photobucket.com/albums/uu85/kedgetim/2012-10-1400-19-12708.jpg[/IMG][/hidden]
[quote="Pootrain"]These are an interesting look behind the scenes of early SDA.

http://m2k2.taigaforum.com/post/history_of_metroid_2002_part_1_was_happy_birthday_m2k2.html[/quote]

that was very interesting actually Poo thanks for the link.

nate

2012-10-13 06:28:27 pm

lol yeah i was almost too embarrassed to post that one pic. it's actually not as bad as it looks there since before i closed the case i jammed most of that sata shit down between the other side of the case and the main disk mount. one huge advantage of mikoto's workload is that the cpus are almost always idle, so it's mainly the hard drives i'm paranoid about. that's why all the spacing between those. been extremely lucky so far with them, knock on wood.

Youkai

2012-10-13 08:11:58 pm

Don't know what to speedrun :(

Ok I'm curious now; how does SDA pay for the server costs? That seems like a rather large monthly bill and there are no ads on the site. Is this something that SDA members should be pitching in occasionally to help cover? I would guess some of the ad revenue from the marathons could help with it now but it certainly hasn't always been that way.

nate

2012-10-13 09:18:00 pm

yeah, it's changed over the years. when i was younger i was more politically oriented and i felt like sda had to be financially independent of me to make a statement to the world. like if i paid for everything then sda was just my hobby and not a bigger social movement type of thing, not a vision of things to come but just a failed experiment. it was really important to me that sda run independently of the world where you have to pay money for things and i considered it my challenge to make that the case. i was opposed to paying for everything myself for that reason but i was also opposed to other people paying for it for the same reason.

i knew that sda was ahead of its time, perhaps so much so that the hosting costs would eventually become trivial just thanks to moore's law. we were really lucky that radix was able to make the agreement with the internet archive in 2004 that gave us preferred status (our own collection). so for a while i tried to come up with stalling plans like that, basically hiding the costs of storage and bandwidth. one of those plans was to exploit the shared hosts with their 382389323323 gigs for $15 a month that you weren't supposed to actually use. i also put google ads on the site and was surprised how much i could offset hosting costs that way.

when the shared hosts failed in 2007 i effectively made a special request for donations for the only time in the history of the site. that was when i started provisioning additional dedicated servers. for a very short time in late 2007 sda was financially self-sufficient ("in the black") thanks to the ads even with the additional dedicated servers. then the bottom fell out of the economy in 2008 and google with their effective monopoly on above-board online advertising saw no need to endanger their own profits.

but my income also started to increase in 2008 and with the launch of taiga forum in 2009 i no longer saw sda as my primary hosting expense. finally the situation with the ads got so bad that i decided to put it out of its misery a year or two ago. i think everyone will agree that the site is way better without ads (whether you saw them or not since they screwed up the layout even with adblock).

so yeah that $96 today is less than the $99 i paid in 2004 when we just had the one dedicated server before i started adding shared hosts. it's just trivial. i was right about the moore's law thing. i was right to believe in myself and what i was doing.

it would be interesting to calculate how much random donations chip away at that $96. like i think i just got $10 from someone the other day. but it's all moot because it's so trivial. i definitely appreciate it when people give to help offset the cost, but at the same time it's not something i'll ever ask for again, and i am grateful for that. we're doing better than we ever have before and it's getting better by the day.

yeah, it's changed over the years. when i was younger i was more politically oriented and i felt like sda had to be financially independent of me to make a statement to the world. like if i paid for everything then sda was just my hobby and not a bigger social movement type of thing, not a vision of things to come but just a failed experiment. it was really important to me that sda run independently of the world where you have to pay money for things and i considered it my challenge to make that the case. i was opposed to paying for everything myself for that reason but i was also opposed to other people paying for it for the same reason.

i knew that sda was ahead of its time, perhaps so much so that the hosting costs would eventually become trivial just thanks to moore's law. we were really lucky that radix was able to make the agreement with the internet archive in 2004 that gave us preferred status (our own collection). so for a while i tried to come up with stalling plans like that, basically hiding the costs of storage and bandwidth. one of those plans was to exploit the shared hosts with their 382389323323 gigs for $15 a month that you weren't supposed to actually use. i also put google ads on the site and was surprised how much i could offset hosting costs that way.

when [url=http://forum.speeddemosarchive.com/post/future_of_sda_for_real.html]the shared hosts failed in 2007[/url] i effectively made a special request for donations for the only time in the history of the site. that was when i started provisioning additional dedicated servers. for a very short time in late 2007 sda was financially self-sufficient ("in the black") thanks to the ads even with the additional dedicated servers. then the bottom fell out of the economy in 2008 and google with their effective monopoly on above-board online advertising saw no need to endanger their own profits.

but my income also started to increase in 2008 and with the launch of taiga forum in 2009 i no longer saw sda as my primary hosting expense. finally the situation with the ads got so bad that i decided to put it out of its misery a year or two ago. i think everyone will agree that the site is way better without ads (whether you saw them or not since they screwed up the layout even with adblock).

so yeah that $96 today is less than the $99 i paid in 2004 when we just had the one dedicated server before i started adding shared hosts. it's just trivial. i was right about the moore's law thing. i was right to believe in myself and what i was doing.

it would be interesting to calculate how much random donations chip away at that $96. like i think i just got $10 from someone the other day. but it's all moot because it's so trivial. i definitely appreciate it when people give to help offset the cost, but at the same time it's not something i'll ever ask for again, and i am grateful for that. we're doing better than we ever have before and [url=http://forum.speeddemosarchive.com/post/a_little_extra_something2.html]it's getting better by the day[/url].

Radix

2012-10-13 10:17:43 pm

I'm addicted to games

Great post nate Smiley

BlueGlass

2012-10-14 02:03:08 am

Yep yep yep!

Just wanted to say that I once again find myself in awe of you, nate. The amount of work, effort, time, pain, and love you've put into this site over the years is truly inspirational. Thank you for everything you've done and are still doing for SDA and for us, wether we be runners, members, or just casual gamers stumbling on this place for the first time.

DJS

2012-10-14 02:26:19 am

torch slug since 2006

nate could start writing books, and selling them to cover the costs. but yeah,
thank you nate

Judgy

Edit history:

Judgy: 2012-10-14 02:42:26 am

Judgy: 2012-10-14 02:40:36 am

2012-10-14 02:38:54 am

Borderlands 2 Glitch Hunter/ router.

Quote from BlueGlass:

Just wanted to say that I once again find myself in awe of you, nate. The amount of work, effort, time, pain, and love you've put into this site over the years is truly inspirational. Thank you for everything you've done and are still doing for SDA and for us, wether we be runners, members, or just casual gamers stumbling on this place for the first time.

##Edit: Well said, totally agree and the same for all in the background tinkering away making things work and improving what doesn't.

In the spirit of helping out nate $50 just donated Wink

(and no its not because you said about donations i was going to before i made this thread)

ozzy88

2012-10-14 03:13:49 am

I knew none of this before and now Nate is like the coolest person O.O

Thanks for everything Nate!