Category: News

We had a great visit and it was a lot of fun.

Thanks to everybody who came and I hope you got an impression of how the grid has progressed over the 10 years since it opened to the public. I never got a chance to thank all the people who have come through this grid, and contributed to making the grid it is today. We are in their debt for creating one of the most extensive mainland regions to explore . Our tech staff for making it the stable and excellent platform for our users it is today. The Foundation and Community are continuing to improve and preserve historical builds while creating new and more interactive regions .

Michel Farrell supplied the music from his real file radio show

Hugs all

Zinnia

Just a quick message to let you know the position of the datacentre after the hurricane

They went back on utility power on the 11th at approx. 8:30am EST
all system have been back to normal since then.

Generators help grids stay up through Florida hurricane

VERY IMPORTANT!!
As some may already know, our data center is located in Florida and is in the path of Hurricane “Irma”.
We will keep the grid online as long as possible, but at first sign of any issues at the Data center we will be shutting down the servers in hopes of protecting them from damage.
We do have backups stored on Amazon and Azure, but due to the sizes of the files it would take a very long time to transfer these files back to Florida after the storm and then rebuild any damaged servers, so it would be best to try protecting them from damage in the first place.
Without being able to know what the actual impact of the storm may be, we are actively monitoring the situation with the data center and will do what is best to save the equipment.

Our plan is to leave the servers running for as long as we can.
The data center has dual backup generators with enough fuel to stay online for 2 weeks and the building is a very well constructed building rated to withstand a cat 5 hurricane. It is a multifloor building and some of our servers are on the first floor and some of our servers are on the 2nd floor.
The most serious issue we are looking at is “Storm Surge” which is expected to be between 1-3 feet at the data center. If this should happen, some of the first floor servers will be at risk of flooding and in this situation they will be shutdown if needed without warning.

Additionally, even though the data center has backup generators, power won’t do us any good without data connectivity, so if something were to happen there, we’re at the mercy of repair crews.
While we expect to keep running for as long as we can, it would be wise to expect sudden loss of service in case we need to shut down servers, or in case of damage to data lines in the area.