LlamaServer reliability

[llamabeast]

After the server went down last weekend I realised that actually it has been down quite a lot in 2012. This bothers me because I like to think that I'm providing a reliable service, and I really wouldn't want it to get so that people thought "LlamaServer is good in principle but too unreliable to be worth using." That would be sad.

Now, the reasons for the various recent outages have generally all been different, so my feeling is that it may just have been a run of bad luck. To give you an idea of my perception of long term trends:

- The LlamaServer used to have lots of bad bugs. However I was on my computer all the time and it was my main hobby, so I fixed things fast.

- In the early days in this house (a couple of years ago, until fairly recently) the internet was extremely unreliable, which caused quite a lot of problems.

- Gradually I have been whittling away at the bugs as well as adding automated systems for recovery (so, for example, if the internet goes down the server now recovers when the internet comes back, which it didn't before).

- Now I believe the LlamaServer is the least buggy it's ever been, and the internet connection seems to be more reliable. *However*, due to some changes in my life, I am much less aware of its status. Some of you may remember me posting that I had a bit of a rotten time last year (stepfather died, girlfriend left me), and in an effort to feel better I took up some new activities and restarted some old ones. So now I am never in the house because I've signed up to too much lindy hop and improvised comedy. I remain very keen, and read the forums in breaks at work etc, but since I'm in no games myself I don't notice when the server goes down. It can also sometimes be several days between times when I get to use my computer at home.

- Until very recently I couldn't fix the server from work, so a few times problems were reported but it was literally several days till I was able to fix them. They've now given us ssh access at work though, so in principle I can fix small problems.

Gosh this is a rambly post.

Anyway, the gist is that I believe that the server is likely to be quite reliable in future, but of course I may be kidding myself. So I am going to keep a little diary for the next couple of months of anything that goes wrong, so that I know for sure how reliable it's being and what the root causes are.

However I do need some help from the community. I have no easy way of knowing when the server's stopped working. I think people generally assume that someone else will have let me know, but sometimes noone lets me know for a couple of days. So if the server seems to have stopped just drop me a quick email.

In the other llamaserver thread people were extremely generous in offering money to pay for a hosted online solution. I really appreciate your generosity, thanks guys. However I have this box in my living room which nominally should work perfectly, so I want to try for a bit longer to make it a really reliable solution. If we still have problems I may take you up on your kind offers.