PBW upgrades - Pardon our dust...

[geoschmo]

Several months ago, really almost a year now, Play By Web received the donation of a late model barely used PC from a loyal user. Because of time issues, and because of a general fear of fixing what ain’t broke this machine has been sitting by serving only as an emergency backup in case something happened to the live server. I’ve decided to get off my duff and put the thing into operation. It’s a decent upgrade from the current server hardware and it seems a shame just leaving it sit there unused.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be getting it up and going and transferring existing data to the new box. I’m also going to be upgrading the operating system and whatnot. This won’t be completely painless I’m sure, but most of the work for me will be in getting the new server setup and I won’t take the existing server down till I am confident I’ve got the new one working right. There will be some downtime towards the end of the process, but I am going to make every effort to keep it to a minimum.

The new box doesn’t have enough memory and it’s incompatible with the current server’s memory sticks. Also it came with a pair of 40GB HDD’s, which are certainly useable, but hardware is pretty cheap right now so I’m planning on getting a single larger HDD instead. I’m looking at going for 2GB of memory and there’s a nice 250GB HDD on sale pretty cheap that I think will more than accommodate the larger files involved with SE5.

Altogether I’m looking at about $240 for the memory and HDD. If anyone feels the urge to donate to PBW to offset some of this cost it would certainly be appreciated. Donations are accepted via Paypal and there are links to donate in my signature and also on the PBW website.

Stay tuned for further updates. Hopefully when this is all done the site will be humming along better than ever.

Geoschmo