FreeSide On The Web

Over the last couple of years,  FreeSide has grown substantially both in production machines as well as the amount of consumed space. Also, by adding and removing servers and terminals over that time, the network (and the room) has become a bit of a mess both physically and systems wise.

As such, Reboot!, the total FreeSide rebuild “event” will be taking place in the next couple of weeks. Unfortunately, this will cause some major downtime over the space of a few days (probably a weekend), while we rebuild each server system and tweak server hardware to be more efficient, add new (and some improved) services and sort the general infrastructure of the room using the new server/network racks.

Anybody who is part of FreeSide is welcome to help out (http://www.freeside.co.uk/content/join), however, keep in mind that there is limited space in the room as it is, let alone with  lot of people shifting things around, so if you would like to help out, pass us an email to admins[-at-]freeside.co.uk to say, and we will see what can be arranged.

The day should be quite fun, but there is a lot of work to be done. This will be good experience for anybody who enjoys (or has an interest in) Linux servers, network infrastructureand generally how things fit together.

See http://wiki.freeside.co.uk/index.php/Reboot!_2008 for more information on what specific changes we will be making to FreeSide.

 Reboot! is now taking place this weekend (weekend starting 11th April), we will be meeting in the Sun Cafe down Cottingham Road at 10am, have a coffee and head in to get started.

Some people (specifically those with usernames containing underscores) may have noticed that they could not log into the FreeSide wiki (http://wiki.freeside.co.uk). This was due to MediaWiki stripping out underscores from the username before authentication.

This has now been sorted and all users can now log in as expected.

Thanks.