New Star Frontiers Web site

So today was supposed to be the offical announcement of my new Star Frontiers web site call The Star Frontiers Network. The web site is ready. There are still things to do but it has the parts I wanted immediately. It's running on RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 (actually Scientific Linux 5) in a virtual machine under VMware using their free VMware Server software.

I ran into some technical dificulties however. I am getting a new computer at home to replace my 5+ year old one sitting on my desk at the moment and the site is going to run from there. My home ISP has decent upstream bandwith so there is no real point paying extra at the moment. Anyway, I got all the pieces for the new computer last week (I'm building it myself) and put them all together.

Here are the specs for those who are interested: AMD Phenom x4 9850 processor (4 2.5GHz cores), 4 GB Ram, 500GM HD and onboard graphics to start. the AMD chip has an unlocked muliplier which means I should be able to overclock the system (I'm hoping to get it up to about 3GHz but we'll see). I have plenty of thermal head room in the case, the overnight stress test maxed out at well below the thermal limits and that was without the second case fan installed and the primary one set to low speed. Anyway that is a different topic. Back to my problem.

I got the OS installed and started a 24 hour stress test to make sure everything is working. The test ran fine and the cooling was working with no problems. I shut down the computer to make a few tweaks in the BIOS (turning on virutalization support and what not) and when I tried to restart the computer it fried a capacitor on the mother board. So now I'm waiting on a replacement. The motherboard arrived back a the manufacturer yesterday so hopefully I'll be getting my new one soon.

In the mean time, I'm making an unoffical announcement of the site to those who (if any) read this blog. For now it will continue to run on my dual core laptop where I have been developing it. My laptop is usually on an connected to the internet (it is about 3x as powerful as my desktop and I use it as my main workstation) so you should be able to access the site at any time. You can find the site at http://starfrontiers.homelinux.net. Currently there are forums (devoted to on-line games and software development), text and audio chat servers, an issue tracker and the beginnings of a Star Frontiers links page (that's what I'm currently working on). So head on over, check it out and post comments and suggestions. When I get the new computer up and running the switch over should be transparent although I expect the site will be a little zippier on the newer faster hardware.