[aprssig] findU status

[James Jefferson Jarvis]

Tyson and SIG -

The death of the aprsworld.net servers may have been exaggerated a little.
One of the four servers died a few months ago. It happened to have one set
of data and some utilities for geocoding locations. That is probably what
you saw the message to the ui-view or other mailing list about.

But all of the servers are extremely overloaded. The most powerful of the
servers is a 1 GHz AMD box. It was cobbled together on a non-existent
budget back in 2001. It's done well, but the increase in demand and volume
of APRS traffic has it very overloaded. Its load average seldom drops
below 0.9. The remaining maps server is also quite a bit overloaded.

Because of these (and other) issues, I decided to bite the bullet and
purchase a new server. I ordered the server last Friday and it arrived
this morning. It was about $1,200. It's a Intel D845 duo, 2 gigs of RAM, 2
x 250 gigabyte hard disks, ect. In the hour or so I have had to work on
it, it appears to be very fast. This machine will become the primary
database server and will also be configured to be a backup maps and
geocoding server. The existing database server will remain as the public
accessible MySQL server and as a secondary database server. Depending upon
the load, it may end up serving maps as well.

So far this year there have been about $300 of donations to aprsworld.net.
Previous years donations have covered most of replacement drives and
hardware maintenance, with the rest coming out of my pocket. Donations for
the new server would certainly be welcome and appreciated. Details of how
to donate can be found on the front page of http://www.aprsworld.net. A
list of donors and sponsors can be found at:
http://www.aprsworld.net/info/sponsors/.


Thanks all,

-Jim KB0THN

> A few days ago a ham was posting on one of the APRS email lists that
> your server had gone down and was going to cost over a thousand dollars
> to repair. He was using the google maps portion of your server and was
> wanting to set up some kind of donation service so you could get the
> thing working again. Then after I read that email the maps that I use
> from this source:
>
> http://maps.aprsworld.net/mapserver/lastposition.php?call=N7ZMR&scale=street
>
> had stopped working for a couple of days, but now I see that they are
> back up. So I had assumed the whole server was down.