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Toughbooktalk.com changes!

Posted: Thu Mar 14, 2019 1:29 pm
by Rob
Team,

PREFACE: Before everyone panics, please know that I’m not going anywhere and that everything I’m going to be doing will be for the greater good of everyone for the Toughbook community!

I’m just writing to update you all as to the future of Toughbooktalk! As many of you well know I am spread VERY thin with my career as the Vice President of Rugged Depot (We are the largest Panasonic Authorized Tier A Prime Toughbook vendor in the entire world as of the end of 2018), and I don’t have the time needed to keep the website running correctly. As such I’ve fallen WAY behind on little maintenance. Captcha has been broken for a year or more now and I have a list of users which cannot register which means our awesome community cannot grow. I am not okay with it being in shambles like this. As such I am going to need to hire someone to maintain it. I’m not sure yet what this will cost but my first step is probably going to be to convert the entire site to a better, more reliable bulletin board software such as v-bulletin.

I’m unsure of the costs and quite frankly I don’t care. I just want it to work correctly. I am *VERY* uneasy with relinquishing total control of my website as well so there has to be some way to do this without relinquishing 100% control.

The other issue I have is this: The big honkin’ server which is running the site which is graciously paid for by 100% donations from all of you guys sucks down power like it’s going out of style. When I was running a big portion of Rugged Depot from my basement of my house this wasn’t an issue as I was being compensated for the “larger picture”. We (Rugged Depot) have grown so quickly that I moved out of my basement over a year ago and we are in the process of buying a massive 12,000 square foot facility to support my refurbishing department. As such I’m left with this electricity sucking server which I of course have on two dedicated circuits and the server alone consumes $44/month in power which is verified with a watt meter and compared to the cost per kilowatt hour. That’s $528/year which I don’t want to pay.

Some of you may have seen my post in the Lenovo section about purchasing a new honkin’ laptop to keep my portion of the business running here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads ... oo.827992/ . I am going to do this regardless as I can’t deal with having a regular desktop now that I travel to an office every day.

As such, I will be left with a still current is almost TWICE as powerful workstation with an i7 6700 with an NVMe SSD in it compared to the server now. The Xeon X5560’s in the server now score a 5399 on the CPU mark VS the i7 6700 is at 10,005. This will make a perfect energy efficient server. I’m sure I can use Win 10 Pro as the OS instead of Server 2019 so there won’t be an $800 cost there which is nice.

The core websites that are run on the server are a total of only 539GB with Toughbooktalk.com taking up 507GB of data.

The plan:

As such with a 1TB Samsung 970 EVO NVME SSD upgrade which is available for $248 or 2TB Samsung 970 Evo is $498. 1TB gives me 930GB of usable space with the OS and programs taking up about 50GB. That doesn’t leave much room for expansion for the future. As such I feel the 2TB one would be the best bet. 2TB storage gives us 1,860GB of usable space with 50GB being used for the OS/programs leaving us about 1.8TB of space for Toughbooktalk.com

Numbers on the drives according to the Samsung Magician: Server read is 522MB; write is 19MB. NVME SSD tested as it was on my workstation now is 2248 read; 359MB write. Yes, I know it should be 3000+/2000+ but I’m going on real world here with my workstation cranking it out during a full load while working. Either way the SSD is staggering compared to the drives in the server now. Of course these kinds of crazy fast drives didn’t even exist when the server was deployed back on 11/13/14

This 2TB SSD will run all the websites and the cheesy 4TB spinning drive that’s in this workstation now will drive the other 1.28TB of other personal stuff.

In closing:

The $500 drive is paid for in one year alone on my electricity bill. As of now I’m not asking for ANY donations whatsoever as this project is funded but I am wondering if anyone on here knows enough about PHP to potentially run the site? Right now Blair is a moderator and that will stay the same but I am looking for someone who has the time to care for the site. I’m much rather higher from within here to help keep it going VS reaching out to a 3rd party company.

P.S. something is also wrong with the 2TB offsite secure VPN backup drive and I won’t know the costs (if any) to fix/replace that either as that’s one more thing that failed about a week ago that I didn’t know about til just now when I sat down and did a thorough wellness check on the server.

Thanks for everyone’s time in reading this and I’m open for any and all suggestions/comments/concerns :)

Re: Toughbooktalk.com changes!

Posted: Sun Mar 17, 2019 3:02 pm
by kode-niner
Great news, Rob.

Re: Toughbooktalk.com changes!

Posted: Sat Mar 13, 2021 10:49 am
by teo
How's everybody. Just to say hello! Its been a long time. Hope all are ok.

teo

Re: Toughbooktalk.com changes!

Posted: Sat Mar 13, 2021 3:58 pm
by UNCNDL1
Hello TEO, how are things going with you up North?
Spring is right around the corner and now that we’ve gotten vaccinated we can travel out of state again.
Stay safe and mask up everyone.

Re: Toughbooktalk.com changes!

Posted: Wed Mar 17, 2021 6:45 pm
by Shawn
Good to hear from you Teo.

Re: Toughbooktalk.com changes!

Posted: Mon Jan 31, 2022 5:31 pm
by Rob
Hello team,

The server is *FINALLY* migrated over! Notebookreview going end of life is what fueled me to do this!

Anyways, it's all up and running on a new server!!

Thanks!

Re: Toughbooktalk.com changes!

Posted: Mon Jan 31, 2022 5:46 pm
by Rob
Ohh and I will be updating the forums as well to add additional forums for the newer model Toughbooks! Primarily the new Android devices, the FZ-55 and the FZ-G2.

Re: Toughbooktalk.com changes!

Posted: Tue Feb 01, 2022 10:11 am
by theoak2
Good to see toughbooktalk back up!

Thanks Rob!

Re: Toughbooktalk.com changes!

Posted: Tue Feb 01, 2022 4:18 pm
by toughasnails
Rob wrote: Mon Jan 31, 2022 5:46 pm Ohh and I will be updating the forums as well to add additional forums
This is AWSOME Rob it's so nice to see toughbooktalk back up and not because NBR is gone. This has been always home.
Thank you Rob :cheers:

Re: Toughbooktalk.com changes!

Posted: Tue Feb 01, 2022 5:57 pm
by UNCNDL1
Please let us know if you need anything…