MEPIS Community Forum

I'm glad this stretched across two months (hope it did), but just got this done --with pleasure. Thanks for organizing this Brooko.
jblu

The site was down for a while during lunch time (local Swedish time)
I experienced problems during the past days as well.
So far I have "pumped" some 150 USD into the Mepis circus (donation Autumn last year, donation May this year, Premium subscription).
A new copy of Windows 7 costs less then 150 USD (in Sweden). One time cost.

Hosting is something that is offered at any street corner (I work myself in a hosting company). If my company was supplying such a bad service as the provider for this site, we'd be out of market in a week.

Thanks to Warren for his efforts, but this is intelorable.

is it just coincidence that debian-multimedia.org is also non-responsive today?

Access to all the malware in the world. Priceless.

I have to agree that this is poor. Web hosting is a very competitive market there's on reason to put up with poor service.

Poor compared to what, I've been using MEPIS since 2004, I don't remember mepis.org being down before (it might have been, but don't remember) if the site was down only 2 instances in 6 years is not that bad. Also the problems seem to be unrelated, first it was a bad Motherboard and now it was a power interruption, it's only chance that they happened one next to another one. Moving to another host will mean one more down time. Come on people show some patience and trust in Warren, if he finds the service unreliable he will switch to another host.

And by the way, nobody is begging for money, people donated because they wanted to, if you are going to be sorry for the money then don't donate, don't come complaining here that you wasted money because the site was down because of a power failure. Sorry, but I can't find a way to put this in a nicer way.

Adrian: I don't know about you, but I'm not sending money for I happen to have a surplus of cash. I send money because I do believe in Mepis and I want to support it.
Mine is an investement for the future: I hope for an increasingly impressive distro such as it is already. And the bucks that I have sent are my small token to support the project.

I am not sending dollars to Warren as a person. I am sure he is a very nice guy but I think it would be insulting for him to receive money out of the blue, as if he was a street beggar.

But I also ask something in return, namely a working site (for me this forum is part of the Mepis-package) and a performing distro.

I don't about about the pre-2004 era. I am certainly glad that it has improved, but I can tell you that this site has been down for quite a few times in the past weeks. Maybe because of the time difference you never noticed, but I did.

Poor compared to the fact that the move to Warren's hosting solution was supposed to be an improvement. The previous host became intolerable and the move was the right thing to do. However, a decent webhost should be immune to power outages and hardware failures should be resolved quickly and efficiently. There are many that guarantee very high uptimes.

I doubt Warren uses the site as much as we do collectively - with global presence there will be someone on here 24/7 - so I'd be surprised if he were aware every time there was a problem.

Why shouldn't people complain here? We're all part of the community and this forum is a reflection of everything that happens in it.

Agreed. I understood Adrian to be trying to separate paying for a product from donating to a project and, if that's right, then I think he's correct in arguing (in both senses of the word) that there is an important difference: donations, by definition, do not get something in return, whereas payments, equally by definition, do.

I didn't say people should not complain here, I said that people should have a bit of patience. Mepislovers was down for a while but in the meantime it was moved to Warren's host so THAT problem was solved, yes, we've had two problems since then, one related to a bad motherboard and another related to a power failure from what I've heard -- seems to me like a fluke, that considering that the mepis.com site was pretty reliable in the past.

You have couple of choices at this point: you can start to yell and tap your foot, and demand that the site be moved to another host -- which in turn will mean another interruption (and there can still be other unforeseen problems on the new host, is there any telling that the other host won't have a motherboard going bad at some point in the future?) or you can wait to see if this was a fluke or not. Choose whatever you want...

@DuffyDuck I understand your frustration, but since I know that "**** happens" in general (and in IT in special) and know that mepis.com was pretty reliable in the past I have a bit more patience. Besides, don't confuse Mepislovers problems with mepis.com the sites were separated and Warren didn't have control of what was happening on Mepislovers, now things have changed to the best I would say, but unfortunately the eggs are in the same basket, but the site is fast and responsive so it's a clear improvement in my view.

Now, maybe the site will go down again and make me look like a fool, or maybe it will be up for years like it did before... time will tell, I have no other way to tell, but even Google goes down from time to time. It bothers me when people don't understand that unforeseen problems are part of IT and expect a level of reliability that's either not possible, or too expensive. I am not happy with the site being down, I don't know how come a provider can run out of power, I should be even more upset because I post more on this forum and spend more time here, so presumably I'm the more affected by the downtime than other people who come here occasionally, however I didn't die if the site was off couple of days. Again, that's not what I expect from mepis.org either, but I also don't like to demand from people who are dealing with the problem first hand (while I don't have all or even most of the details) to do things just because I was inconvenienced and somehow I feel they owe me something.

I donated countless times to mepislovers and to mepis, I will have to look for my receipts to see how much I donated, I donated my time trying to help people around, I donated my time trying to improve the Wiki, I was one of the people who started the Wiki and for years I've been one of the few contributors. Also donated my time and effort for the remastering script and the apt-notifer. Still with all that I don't feel like Warren owes me anything or that I have any right to make a fuss because the hosting company messed up somehow. But if you feel entitled to do so, feel free, that's the last you hear from me about this issue.