Its been awhile since I hopped up on the soapbox, but I guess nows the time. First, a status report: We got about a million hits last week. The new server and connection to UPN held up fine. We saturated the T1 a bit, but the T3 will be in soon. The DNS moved on monday and it seems to be cool. I also wanted to plug Linux-HW who sent us the new 9gig hard drive. Muchos thanks. I also added some links in the 'older stuff' box so you can link directly to previous days stories in the normal homepage format. Much more convenient. Click below to read about Slashdot user accounts and other nifty features that will be coming.

I've recieved quite a number of writeups from folks on the LSA, the LSB, and various other Linux standardization efforts. I've decided that tomorrow I'm going to post a few of the better ones. If you have an opinion (and judging by my swollen inbox, you all do) write an essay saying what you feel and why you feel it. Does Linux need to run free? Is this freedom the thing preventing us from truly being mainstream? We won't resolve it, but hopefully we can fairly present a few sides to the debate.

Welcome to SanFrancisco. We're hooked up on the new box out here in CA. We're now on a T1 that we can load up, and in a few weeks, we'll have a T3 to saturate. You can use 207.218.152.112 for now. temp.slashdot.org should also propogate around sooner or later. I'll get to InterNIC soon. In the meantime, hurry and post lots of comments to make up for the last 24 hours.

Allright this is the temp server. Comment posting has been disable until the box goes up at its new home (hopefully in the next 24hrs or so). I'll overpost things today so nobody gets to bored (This is my chance to post all the flamebait articles I've been saving!). Anyway, sorry about the hassle, but when we get to the new place, there is a whole T1 for Slashdot. And a few weeks later, a T3. Hopefully we won't worry about the Slashdot Effect killing ourselves any more.

Tomorrow we are shipping the server to UPN. We've been shooting around many ideas about how exactly we're going to handle it, and after weighing all possible alternatives, what will be happening is as follows: The server will go out as late in the day as possible that will guarantee next day shipping. We'll definately insure the box. If it blows up, I want to buy a corvette and a quad CPU alpha to replace it :). However, in the meantime, we've got a temp box. It's a slower box, so to make up for it, we're going to disable comment posting. It won't be long, so please don't make me feel guilty about it. This will at least allow us to post stories for the day. After the move, we'll sort out the DNS stuff, and then hopefully, I won't have to worry about bandwidth or CPU or memory or anything for a long time.

Allright we're back up. Few minor glitches popped up, but hopefully everything is functional again. Keep an eye out for strange behavior. Hopefully things will be less strange now that we have a nice clean box running the show.

Ben Burdick (weez) writes "SlashNET's second forum was a success. A log of the night conversing with the Stampede Linux developers can be found here "

Well due to an oversight in Slashdot's code, posting of the 2000th story has caused the stock market to crash, as well as causing Russia to accidentally launch their nukes. If only we had thought ahead, so many lives could have been spared. Oh wait, different 2k problem. Anyway, we set our daily hits record (224,000 hits in a single day) on wed, as well as posting our 2,000th story (this one!). It's been a good week, but now I'm moving Slashdot to a brand new 9gig HD, and then we'll be ready to move to faster bandwidth country and prepare for the 10k story bug which will probably cause a comet to destroy the earth.

Ben Burdick (weez) writes "SlashNET will be conducting a forum with the developers of Stampede Linux on Saturday at 10 p.m EST. The forum will be held in #TheVoid. "

First, since we have spare clock cycles and memory, I implemented a Comment Search Script. Use it if you desire. Next I fixed the poll booth comment glitch that was causing everything to look funky. Third, I changed the banner HTML to a never version using (Ack!) Layers/IFrames. The page renders much faster on my box now. If anyone notices browser incompatibilities, let me know (please don't email just to tell me you hate layers. I already don't have time to reply to all of my mail). Next up is a rewrite to a chunk of the homepage so it displays the last 24 hours of stories in the main space, and the previous 24 hours in the Older Stuff box. Hopefully later today. The mysql bug is still here, but I've got a cron job making sure we don't stay down for long...

The third-to-last piece of hardware just went in the Slashdot box this morning. VA Research (Blatant Plug Alert:Go Buy Stuff From Them!) sent us some parts- RAM being the important one. The box now weighs in as a Dual P2/266 with 256 megs of RAM. This will mean that the box will still function during heavy posting (ala any time either KDE or Gnome is hinted at *grin*). The last piece is a hard drive/uber fast controller which should be here RSN. Then if we can just iron out the mysql glitch, everything will be spiffy to ship the server out to the land of vast bandwidth. We're getting there folks, so keep hanging in there. As a side note, we had 182,000 hits yesterday- all this hardware should give us some room to grow now.

OK, a good number of you have been e-mailing about the server status, where we are going to co-locate. Stop it. Thanks to the wonder of the Pine inbox beep, my laptop sounds like I am trying to start a stacatoo rap group. I think I'm gonna go gold next week.
Anyway, we are going to be moving out West, young man, to the fabled hills of San Fransico. Blacklight, who handles the ads for here, Everything and others will be coloing with us on a (ta-da) T1 and a T3, so that should give us room to grow. We will be living at UPN, for those who care. New hardware is coming for both Everything and Slashdot, so that will be picking up as well. Lastly, if anyone is interested in writing book reviews, please drop me a line.

I've sorted out most of the kinks now. For those who are curious, the system currently is dying because of a glitch in Mysql- occasionally it just goes nuts and uses 100% CPU. When that occurs, Slashdot becomes unusable until the process is killed. I've upgraded almost everything to the latest version, as well as drasticly simplified a few of the more complicated parts of the site, so I'm hoping things are cool. We should have more RAM and a new HD in the next day or 2. After we're sure those are stable, we're shiping the box to a new ISP where we'll have more bandwidth than even Slashdot can consume. Then life shall be peachy. At least, I hope...

Chomsky writes "The linux/technical community was both shocked and dismayed this morning, as reports filtered through the internet of a linux enthusiast successfully loading the Slashdot news website in Netscape. The news was at first met with mostly suspicion and skepticism. "It just seems so unlikely", said longtime linux advocate Pengo the Penguin. "In the past week I've gotten through like, twice at the most. It's that cursed 'Everything' section, I'm telling ya." The interviewee then ate a bucket of raw fish and belched loudly. Not everyone is as skeptical though. An anonymous caller claimed to be using a beowulf cluster comprised of 64 alphas to calculate and predict successful connections to the Slashdot website. "Although it sounds like a hoax, we predicted this connection", said the caller. "According to our calculations, someone will connect again early next week". " In all seriousness, we're getting more RAM and moving to a faster connection in the next week or so- hang in there. And stop emailing me already. It's very disheartening to delete 50 of these things each morning :)

Continuing in what appears to be a long trend of "Whats the Best Hardware for Linux" Ask Slashdot questions, Zak wrote in to ask us what UPSs people are comfortable with under Linux. What brands work, what don't, what features to look for etc.

A number of people have written over the last few days, offering help and also offering advice for the Slashdot migration to bigger bandwidth. Thanks-this really shows the strength of the Slashdot community. That, and you all flooded my mailbox. But I'll get over it. With lots of counseling. Anyway, where we stand right now is that we are talking to a few people/colos closely right now, checking out specific things and narrowing things down. With a little luck the move will be occurring later on this week. I know things have been unreliable here for the past little bit, but the light is at the end of the tunnel, and I don't think think it's an oncoming train.

David Eisner sent in this Ask Slashdot. It's quite different then usual, but I think it's a really interesting one. He asks "To become a good writer, one studies the works of great writers. To become a good programmer, perhaps it would help to study the works of great programmers. It has always surprised me that this isn't part of the formal training of a programmer. My question, then, is this: What do Slashdot readers consider to be the great works of programming literature? Programs that made you think, "Wow! This is beautifully designed!", programs worthy of study."

It's finally somewhat usable folks. You can join irc.slashdot.org, and /msg Salsa CHANNELS to see what the channels are that she is monitoring. If channels are used, they are logged, and a link is added to the story here, to the IRC log. Currently Salsa is monitoring the newest 6 stories. If things work out, she'll monitor more. Don't be surprised if she blows up for a while yet, but we'll get the kinks worked out yet.

Hey, it's my turn to Ask Slashdot *grin*. We're seriously considering running a permanent ISDN line to the geekhouse so we don't have to keep redialing and sharing a single tired little modem over 5 users who all want bandwidth. The question is simply what is a good ISDN modem for us? Needs to work with Linux and preferably not to expensive. Who's got experience?

Ok tons 'o' crazy stuff is happening and I'm gonna answer this all at once so I can stop with the email. We have 3 problems currently. First is RAM. We can only run so many httpd's at a time, and so around 11, they are all being consumed, and connecting gets painful. Especially when stories have lots of comments and people use flat mode (eg, the Gnome/KDE flame war yesterday). We're getting more soon, several folks have offered to swap RAM for advertising, so this'll be solved soon. Second is bandwidth. We're just going to have to move the servers. If you know a good place to host boxes, contact Hemos. Ideally some place that will do it, at least partially in exchange for some advertising. Finally, the machine is acting funky- I'm not sure exactly what it is, but we're trying a few things. We'll work it out asap.