Future plans for Defence Force

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Dbug
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Future plans for Defence Force

Post by Dbug »

Don't worry, it's a big title but I'm not announcing I'm leaving the scene :)

Basically, these few last months I had problems with a number of parts of my infrastructure, and funnily enough most was related to the parts that are not in my direct control: The service offered by Yahoo! Small Business (who is hosting the legacy part of Defence Force) has been less and less satisfying, the performance is abysmal (try to access http://blog.defence-force.org and cry), I had problems with the FTP and the Mail as well.

At this point all I'm using it is to declare sub-domains to point on Miniserve (the mini-Itx Linux server in my apartment), which despite being in my home and running on a crappy Atom Processor with 4gigs of RAM is much more reactive than the virtualised piece of turd running out there in the USA.

I decided that enough is enough, so I'm going to progressively migrate all the remaining services to my home PC, and in the process with proceed to some hardware, software and websites upgrades:

- Miniserve 3.0 is on the way and should be a decent upgrade (2x the cpu power, 3x the disk space, 4x the memory capacity) when fully configured
- I'm probably going to run my own mail and dsn server as well
- The blog will not use Wordpress anymore (too many security issues and upgrade hurdles)
- The main Defence Force website will be totally reorganized and be using dynamic (php) pages instead of the static ones that have not been changed since they were written.

In the list of things I plan to do for the site itself:
- I will split in different domains the different things (ie: "oric.defence-force.org", "atari.defence-force.org", etc...)
- Things like the Oric library will be reorganized as a database, with some search engine that generates pages of results dynamically
- All the "how to code", code sample, memory map, etc... will migrate to some articles on the osdk site where it belongs
- All the pages and subdomains should somewhat be linked so the navigation can be done easily and people discover places they did not know existed :)
- Barely used domains like Q&A will be removed (all they are good at is to attract spammers)
- I'm not sure about the Wiki, the only person to use it were Twilighte and I and it contains mostly stale information
- I'm planning to drop the French part, which is the main reason why all these pages got stale: Writing both in French and English took way too much time, and these days the automatic translation services are good enough to produce understandable content.

Also in the final news, it looks (not 100% certain yet) that I managed to obtain the "defence-force.com" domain name, which will point to the same location as "defence-force.org", but it does not hurt to have the name if only because it makes ranking of pages tend to go higher (based on totally empirical data), which made me consider that perhaps it was time to get a new logo and design.

Feedback and comments are welcome :)
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Chema
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Re: Future plans for Defence Force

Post by Chema »

Dbug wrote:Don't worry, it's a big title but I'm not announcing I'm leaving the scene :)
Phew!!! You scared me!
I decided that enough is enough, so I'm going to progressively migrate all the remaining services to my home PC, and in the process with proceed to some hardware, software and websites upgrades:
That sounds reasonable to me.
- I'm not sure about the Wiki, the only person to use it were Twilighte and I and it contains mostly stale information
That would be a pitty. And I feel a bit guilty for not having written anything there myself. I often use it as a reference, and I think that, at least the content, should be somewhere. I know there are many things missing (and I have not too much free time now as to start collaborating) but it was a nice project and some info there is very useful.

I imagine this is quite a complex task, so I can wish you the best of lucks :) Defence Force is important for all the oric community so if you need something just ask!
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Hialmar
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Re: Future plans for Defence Force

Post by Hialmar »

I can help you if you want.

I am a bit full at the moment but it should be better in may.

I know PHP well (I have taught it in the university for some time).

As for hosting, I personally use OVH (1 shared web site and 1 dedicated server there) and I'm quite satisfied with them.

If you host everything at home, you'd better put things in a Dropbox share (or equivalent) just in case of fire/theft.
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ibisum
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Re: Future plans for Defence Force

Post by ibisum »

- I'm not sure about the Wiki, the only person to use it were Twilighte and I and it contains mostly stale information

If you and Twi were using it, then it must have become something of value. I think it'd be a pity to lose it - and thus I volunteer to help maintain it if needed.
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Re: Future plans for Defence Force

Post by Yicker »

I know this has been mentioned before but would it be possible to add support for Tapatalk to the forum whilst your doing the upgrade etc. :D
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coco.oric
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Re: Future plans for Defence Force

Post by coco.oric »

I've gone several times on the wiki because there's a lot of valuable things.
I think it's a good idea to keep it, despite a lot of them doesn't have time to increase it
coco.oric as DidierV, CEO Member
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Dbug
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Re: Future plans for Defence Force

Post by Dbug »

Hialmar wrote:I can help you if you want.
I am a bit full at the moment but it should be better in may.
I know PHP well (I have taught it in the university for some time).
I'm also doing all the for the fun and to learn things: http://osdk.defence-force.org and http://oric30years.defence-force.org are written in custom made php made during a week end, I guess I will manage :)
Hialmar wrote:As for hosting, I personally use OVH (1 shared web site and 1 dedicated server there) and I'm quite satisfied with them.
Well, I'm not going to leave a hosting company to use another one, the only things I have to find about are:
- Making sure I get a real fixed IP (the current setup is a bit dodgy)
- Having my own mail server
- Migrating the A-NAME and C-NAME records from Yahoo! to the Domain Name Registrar without actually losing uptime

I'm probably going to use defence-force.com, to handle the transition, which will allow me to test that the new configuration works, and then do a final copy/transfer and switch back defence-force.org to the new place as well.
Hialmar wrote:If you host everything at home, you'd better put things in a Dropbox share (or equivalent) just in case of fire/theft.
All my servers are cross-backed-up between three machines, and there is an additional online backup as well.

@Ibisum,Coco,Chema: I will keep the wiki then, probably find a way to make it more obvious.

@Yicker: For Tapatalk it will be a no: I took the time to read about it, including support forums, and it appears that this thing is a security and update risk for me. In the past they had SQL Injections in the phpBB mod, and more recent versions are bypassing some of the anti-spam/mandatory custom fields that exist in phpBB, at some point their certificate got out of date so users got alerts when connecting. It looks like a typical "make money by selling ads" product. Sorry for that.
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Hialmar
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Re: Future plans for Defence Force

Post by Hialmar »

Well thought setup I see :)

Thanks a lot for the work on this awesome website.
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