PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

works purfect,- thx a lot Valis !



Bud

Of course! Glad we’re all still here.

About a week ago I added an inexpensive colocated virtual server located elsewhere running additional nameservers (DNS redundancy) and helping serve mail etc. The server load hasn't been as much of an issue as of late, but this should improve reliability in terms of access for people everywhere (the company we are hosted by is colocated in L.A. & UK).

This update impacts all clients, not just these forums, but it's a side benefit for us to improve life for all on here.

Forum members:

Our primary hosting service has been acquired by a highly regarded web hosting provider based in the UK, who will be upgrading all systems and increasing the hosting and support quality they offer.

The new server will include a number of generous upgrades including running on NvME disks with EPYC CPUs. I would like to reassure you that this is an extremely well run hosting business.

What does it mean for PlanetZ?

In the next few days (likely Monday) the primary server hosting us will be moving. Once the move is done you can reach out for any service questions or issues that you might see. While we want to make this transition as seamless as possible, if you experience any issues please do let us know.

Future performance upgrades and hardware upgrades will happen over the next three months and should be seamless; you should see increases in performance.

I look forward to working with this new host for a stable and a long-term strong relationship.

Thx for notification, Valis.
Good luck for the move !



Bud

Is the site address (forums.scopeusers.com) remaining unchanged?

Is it possible the dead links to the old devices/modules/presets will be resolved with this move/update?

Cheers!

The problem with the old devices is twofold:

Modern files are stored with a string of characters as the file name. When the database was updated they were concatenated, and so the file ame has to be restored. If files were uploaded exactly as named in the post, the means of encoding the file name would perhaps work for each file (reverse them) but I found I had to do this to telhe directory on the server and not the post(s), and there are over 10,000 that then need to be hand matched to posts. The concatenation in the database is too obscure to automate, so it’s at least partially a manual process.

Legacy files are store by file name, but these often had spaces or characters that were stored differing from the post file name (those we’re replaced on storage as would have made sense in an era when spaces and extended characters were not well supported by operating systems and web browsers—hence %NN methods of representation). So a similar but different issue presents itself in automating this process, as these were ALSO concatenated In the database (Or stripped entirely).

The original forum owner John Cooper had tried to script a solution, whether what we have now includes that or not, I would have to go back and read those notes. But there are two cases, so the database has to be split into three hose two sections, and processed separately.

I did this for 3-4 weeks at one point before making a post asking for help, and many donations were given but I exceeded that envelope by a wide margin and needed to return to making income by normal means. Faxinandu offered to help but quickly fell out with his partner and joined Native Instruments. I also have not looked at that in a while, so I would likely need to retread much ground as this is the best of my recollection.

valis wrote: ↑Sun Apr 30, 2023 12:47 pm The problem with the old devices is twofold:

Modern files are stored with a string of characters as the file name. When the database was updated they were concatenated,

Is there a backup of the database as it was before these concatenations ? Also, what DBMS is the database (MySQL etc ?)

MYSQL, no. I have this running as it came from John, plus all of the phpbb updates since. I think one of the problems was he tried to fix it, but again I’d have to go back and read my notes.

A good % of the older ones (before random string era) are recoverable by hand because the filenames aren’t all impossible. I did about 10-12 pages of them back when I worked on this. Some aren’t do-able though just due to similar filenames, at least without more legwork.

It was a bigger task than it seemed once I dug in. I took notes from the handoff discussion with John and the members generously donated, and natural language plus scripting was still not enough.

I should add that the downside to the older ones is that they are very old devices, they certainly all pre-date the phase fix and many predate even 3.0.

I love this forum, but downloading files sometimes feels hard.
With Amiga computers, there were some ftp mirrors, that allowed directly access to archive files.
Is the same possible with planetz ?

BTW: I know, that some very old devices fail to work on 5.x and 7.x, but many do. Some of them don't have a successor, so sometimes still use them.

Keep in mind this is an old codebase. There are other sites, and I don't mind hosting the files in a different format but it's probably not within my reach at present, due to time constraints.

Thanks for the response Valis, it was the early modular modules I was seeking. Mainly for curiosity as well as holding a hope there was some patching gems revealed, to learn from. Hadn't realised it would be such an arduous, time consuming task. Thanks for the detailed explanation.

(Forum still looking stable after the move, thanks)