After much work by our IT gurus we are ready to move! To complete the switch, the board will be off line on Friday 10/26/07 starting at 6 PM CDT (GMT-6) for approximately four hours.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
HOW AM I GOING TO SURVIVE......

OMG

Can we set up a temporary internet shelter for those of us who.......oh!.....wait a minute......6pm......EST?

Then I'll be asleep over here! [BIG sigh of relief]

Maybe we get together for a withdrawal chat on tryphon? http://www.tryphon.it/chat/ Bookmark it now!

OH NO !!!

I can't bear it. Perhaps I can be anesthetized during the procedure.

Please wish them good luck and send our thanks, as well, Elaine!

Be strong everyone. We can stand a 4 hour outage. Just take up your fave pen and write your provocative posts longhand and snail mail them to Rhudairi at MT. Keep you busy for 4 hours and he will have extra fuel for the furnace as he burns the censored material mumbling "anathema, anathema"



But what happens if it goes longer? 6 hours? 12 hours??? a week?

Yikes!!! Oh well. I will just have to survive!!

Jim

Looking forward to the improvements the new server will bring as well as the relief to the Admins it will be in a (hopeful) reduction in IT problems!

THANKS and hope it goes well!!!!

OMG!! this is the end of the world!! What am I going to do while the board is down.......... I know, I will clean some of my fountain pens and let them soak for a while or overnight. Maybe even order some ink from Sam.

Sheesh, you think they'd at least wait until the Friday of the Columbus Pen Show so those folks going to the pen show will at least have some other pen-related activity to keep us, er - them - occupied!

James

Feel free to have a wiki party over at http://www.penpedia.com/w too! Get your friends together and add an article, heh.

Don't sweat it. MT is in charge. Ernst has the changeover plan well in hand and is already busy welding the new pipes. The Babbage will be a far superior server (as long as the coal supply holds out) to anything with Intel chips and we will all get used to the new posting protocols and decorative fonts.

It would be nice if the Admins posted before and after photos of their coiffures as I expect they will be pulling much of their hair out.

Is the current server the cause of brief "outages" I've been experiences at least once a day? I click on a post or thread and it grinds and gives me an error page. I try once more and still no forum. I go off and do something else for a few minutes and come back to a working forum again.

or am I just jinxed?

YOU'RE JINXED!!!

And so was I. Oh boy! This is going to give me withdrawal symptoms!

Thanks, for working towards a better FPN!

We believe that these outages are due to the current server.

Whew...I'm not the only one. I was convinced I had been deemed not worthy of posting anymore! I learned to copy all text before posting/replying/backchanneling so I wouldn't lose all my text. Prior to figuring this out, I lost a few long-winded posts...probably for the betterment of all.

Thank you for working to improve an already wonderful place!!

~~Mike

KJ, does that mean that you are going to suddenly "find" those long lost long winded posts and share them with us? LOL

I like our fellow FPN'ers too much to subject them to those late night ramblings.

I will only lose an hour since I work nights, I head off for work at 1730 and don’t get back until about 0700, and since I am asleep until 1700 ...

But i hate not being able to do a quick check before heading to work.

I hope the server switch helps everything to run even better!!

I started to whine about no FPN, and suddenly realized that here we are a bunch of great folks, interesting, intelligent, good looking (mostly) and we can't think of anything else to do on a Friday night but chat about pens (not that that's a bad way to spend time!).

Think I'll ask my honey out to eat and then dust off the stadium seat and hit the local High School Football game!

Thanks, Elaine. I haven't kept up with technical issues (other than the image thing which is no biggie) so I imagine this has been discussed at length and I just didn't know. Thanks for the info. Good luck to the Team in this lovely process!

It's quarter of 6...I'm bracing myself for the outage. Stiff upper lip, everyone!

Uh, yeah, but today is Thursday.

Some of us need 24 hours to panic. Texas is a big state, we have lots of room to roam while in our FPN-withdrawal daze.

Doesn't Friday come earlier someplace?

Oh, good gawd. I am a dork. Yes, today is Thursday, isn't it? At work today we kept saying how it felt like a Friday...(heavy sigh). Pre-panicking is kinda my thing, though.

Good idea, Elaine!

Ok, I just re-read your original post and it says FPN will be offline for only about 4 hours
That's doable.....

Oh, yeah? Only four hours? I bet! Last Friday, Wickedweasel.com was supposed to be "down" for only a "few hours" for a website remake. In truth, it was down for five days! (As were most of its more ardent fans ). I trust that such an unfortunate occurrence will not befall our beloved FPN. At my age, pen porn takes precedence over bikini porn.

Oh no. Sixteen hours and counting.

What the *$%^ am I going to do for four hours?

Get on eBay and find more pens, of cuss.

I am as addicted to this place as the next person - but really, do we have nothing better to do on a Friday night than sit around on the computer?

While the admins tear their hair out getting the new server working, I will be taking my kids to the Pumpkin Prowl at the Seattle zoo. The rest of you, raise a glass of the black stuff to the hard-struggling admins.

Isn't the current server in a closet in CAMs house in Scotland somewhere? The move to MT shouldn't be that bad. Back it up on punch-cards, row them across the Irish Sea, load them into the babbage and your done!

But what I don't get is with Admin in NYC, Dublin, Swinden, Mastericht, Ottowa and Malaysia, why are you using Central Daylight Time?

John

(and of course the greatest thanks to the admin for all their hard work enabling our addiction!)

Central Time Zone RULES!!!

Would whoever is last out please put the cat out, and order 3 bottles of milk for the morning?

Regards,
Ruaidhrí

Three bottles? There are 8,000 members...

That's NJ, not NYC

It's central time because a mysterious super IT guru lost a bet with a leprechaun and this is the price he has to pay. He lives in the Central zone.

I'm off to a lovely dinner with my wife. A nice place. I decided to treat us to night out as my thanks for her putting up with this hobby, this forum (and all the time I spend here), and all the purchases you've all forced on me. Of course, the reservations I made are at a restaurant a half-block from the pen shop....no coincidence, I assure you.

Enjoy some time away, all. Get out and USE those pens that we talk about so often.

Admins and gurus....godspeed, and thank you!!

~~Mike

Ooops - sorry. I was confused between you and Auntie Rebecca (I'll bet that's a first).

So will we ever know whose closet this server is in?

John

Is there a prize for being the last post before the shutdown?

Yep, sure is.
Me and all 12 dogs come visit for 6 weeks.
Good luck.

I'm heading off to Tryphon Chat and will be there for a bit during the outage

http://www.tryphon.it/chat/

....and Texas is so close.....

Uh oh. Five-minute warning. BEEEEEP.

YAY ADMINS AND GURUS!

Thank you, Admin and mystery IT guru(s)!

Wha... Wha... What happened?

Was it over? Did I miss it? Well that wasn't so bad. Had dinner, fed a duck (at our table...long story), bought a bottle of ink, and had a nice stroll with the better half.

It.

It has happened already.

Warm regards, Wim