World: r3wp

yes, sorry, it was SafeWorlds of course. Did not know about IOS state, 
but - IOS was definitely at least one level upon the comm architecture 
of altme ....

I think that someone from RM Assest who is now close to Carl would 
have to ask Carl, about the possiblity of open-sourcing AltME, but 
- AltME is used even by some commercial entities, so I don't know 
if it is likely to happen. As for me, I prefer Carl working on R3. 
And I can't see the situation being dramatic, nor do I agree with 
the launch of the new world. In such a case, I might consider not 
being present. I am used to be here, and apart from personal messages, 
there is not any significant slowdown or outages lately. We were 
in much worse situation in the past imo ...

How about ... we create a backup of this world somewhere, and prune 
all the rarely used groups from here?

I seem to have missed the details on how exactly AltME gets slow 
- it feels OK to me, these days. No real lag when submitting a message.

Of course, all of you are always more then welcome to join me via 
IRC in #rebol on freenode.

Andreas, are there non-altME users there?

Not really, no.

Every few days someone stumbles by but only to quickly leave again 
in general. Every few weeks one of those passersby actually asks 
something. And then, about one out of three of those questions is 
actually REBOL-related.

ok

(Which I find quite interesting, given that I never ever mentioned 
#rebol publicly. Well, at least until an hour ago.)

My two posts just now were very fast, so the slowdown is neither 
consistent nor universal.

The slowdown is for PMs

Except for that message which took 7 seconds

Maybe I should setup altme on another PC and see whether the slowdown 
is a local effect ... ie see how long it takes for a message to appear 
on the other instance

I think it's a combination of AltMe and the server it's running on.

Can anyone tell me if the problem with un-reserved worlds becoming 
unreachable, has been fixed?

I want to put a second world on my computer / world server and in 
the past I spent a fair bit of time resetting worlds due to them 
becoming unreachable.

Carl says he fixed it

But to be sure you could pay the reservation price

Yeah, I know.  Just showing some people what AltME has to offer. 
 Not sure if they are going to use it or not.  Thanks for the reply.

It has been fixed. I run two worlds, and no unexpected outages since 
the time of the fix ....

Brock, I've been running 2 unreserved and 1 reserved world for years 
without any issues.

My world, linux version running on linux machine, has just become 
unreachable since noon after working for years. Nothing changed on 
that side - the altme.com web site reports it as reachable. I can 
connect to it from the linux box it's on, but not from the W XP box 
sitting alongside nor any other.

un-reserved name for the world

updated the server and now accessible

Is this world much faster since Carl reinstalled it ?

yes, pm'ing is now usable again

maybe I can return to my old persona ....

You should give it a try. Whatever was done to this world, it was 
good :) Let's hope it stays that way for a while.

Looks like the linode instance it was running on was pehaps overbooked!

http://www.rebol.com/linode-speed.html

Looks like an HDD going south ...

Might also explain the file corruption for restored groups here.

actually, the corruption is easily explained by the backup taking 
place at the same time of someone posting to those groups

there should be no corruption, when proper back-up tools are used, 
no? :-) (e.g. shadow-copy principles, etc.)

if Carl is just doing a TAR while the altme server is running, it's 
not strange that one or two files don't get backed up correctly. 
a quick workarourd is to keep more than just the last backup, as 
the chance of a file missing from two backups is pretty small.


of course, ideally one would be using ZFS and backing up from a snapshot...

the workaround is to use proper back-up tools, not just tarring the 
stuff :-)

It doesn't help that the client can't detect the issue and save the 
old data somehow. Once you sync a corrupted group, your local store 
is gone (unless you're backing them up locally ;-).

(I am backing them up locally, by the way, if Carl needs anything)


Proper backup tools can't do anything against the altme server overwriting 
the files. Either your filesystem supports snapshots, or the altme 
server has to support the backup operation directly at least by suspending 
file activity while the files are being copied (or, the file storage 
has to be designed so that files are immutable, that way at the very 
least you can't lose old data because of overwriting)

is it just me or does this mean that moderation and message alteration 
is actually possible... 

it would only require a few changes to the server and client so they 
support this feature.

damn!  my whole user group disapeared !!!!

(which means I've just loast every Private message sent to all of 
you... 4.5 MB of converations :-(

It rewrites your local file, right? It seems that Carl's concept 
of  - keep things simple - in fact turned into - constantly try to 
reinvent the wheel, never finish it properly, don't scale well, or 
at all.

Is there a problem with AltME at all? All this that has happened 
seems to not be directly related to AltME, but to the server and 
the backup scheme.

Partially so - but - plain files instead of DB storage of messages. 
If I understand it correctly, e.g. Links group here, got purged, 
and it refers to 153.set - old messages are gone, without the notice.

Henrik, the problem is that the server overwrites the client even 
when the server is wrong (corruption on the server side). It would 
be nice if it recognized the condition and recovered files from the 
clients.


The other problem is: can you think of a backup scheme to avoid this? 
(Note, we're speculating on the base of guesses, but still.)

Backup scheme: I suppose the only way is really some kind of snapshot, 
or by having AltME server pack a single file once an hour, that a 
backup system then can grab and stow somewhere.

or you just run dropbox and have it backup for you automatically 
....

does it do snapshots of all files simultaneously?

serially I would have thought