AIRPORTBILDER

Tom Allensworth - CEO of AVSIM:

It has been a busy day today, and I want the community to know where we are heading and what we are doing. I will take this step-by-step so that everyone understands what we are doing and why.



The Board of Directors of AVSIM tonight voted in the affirmative to purchase a dual set of either IBM x3650 or HP G6’s (we decided not to go with Blades because of delivery and configuration issues). Whichever we choose, they will be equipped with 48 gigs of RAM and some very serious hard disk storage. We will have those delivered to the NOC on Friday of this week. The total cost of those servers will be in excess of $24,000. This has been made possible almost entirely by the donations that have been sent to AVSIM over the last six days. Again, thank you! We will be placing this order tonight or tomorrow morning.



Stan Harmon and John Binner, who we are flying up from down south, will do an install over the weekend, starting on Friday. Keep in mind that they are spending their Memorial Day weekend to see this completed.



Why are we buying new hardware when we have two perfectly good servers already? Two primary reasons; first, we are going to remove their disks and have a forensic run on them and doing that would otherwise cause AVSIM to be offline for some time, even if we purchased replacement disks to use. Secondly, and more importantly, the new hardware will allow us to put into place a number of operational improvements, not the least of which is automatic fall over and a robust and secure backup system (we are also looking at remote off site storage as well lest anyone getting excited about that topic). The old systems we will use as auxiliaries to the two primary servers, and with WHITE, will give us a robust and scalable system.



As for the site content; by doing a forensic on the disk from PURPLE, we believe we will recover most of the Web Site and forum, if we do not already have that stored in backups on the NAS or on the good disks of GREEN. Given that the PURPLE disk will be out of our hands for a period of time, it could be some while before we bring the old forums back online, if they can be brought back at all. We fully expect to have most, if not all of the Library system on within a week or two. In any case, it is our goal to have a rudimentary web site up by Sunday evening EDT.



The design team headed by Steve Stratton is working diligently to bring both a new library and web design together. Once they are ready for prime time, we will replace the rudimentary web site and the new, more capable library when it is ready for prime time.



We will be posting more on this as the week progresses, but we thought that we would give you an update now to let you know that we are moving forward quickly to have AVSIM back online as soon as we possibly can.



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I am going to put my neck on the line here a bit based upon a briefing I received today, and say that our confidence is building about the state of the library. It is my hope that we can have our legacy library back up and running on Sunday. Our email system would also be back in operation.



We will have a Web site back and operating sometime over the weekend. If we can get the old system up and running, great. If not, we’ll create a redirect page for all three domains back to this forum system. In the meantime, the design team continues to work on the web and library redesigns and we will bring them online as soon as the team gives us the go ahead.



As for the Forums system; our confidence is increasing in that there may be something retrievable there. Again, we won’t know until we can inspect the material that we have since recovered and placed on WHITE for storage. More on that later.