If you haven't yet, would you please vote in our latest poll submitted by bigbearomaha concerning your preferred Linux install media? I was wanting to use the results in an article, but there aren't nearly enough votes to be valid right now. Vote away!

Today ain't been our day. We experienced two occurrences of downtime today for seemingly unrelated reasons.

The Irish Open Source Technology Conference http://iotc.firstport.ie (blog live) is a two day event in Dublin, Ireland on June 18th - 20th.

We're currently finalising the full agenda and have a few speaker opportunities available.

Interested? Here's what to do.

Seems I've been having some connectivity problems as of late. The adsl connection keeps disconnecting and causing the intermittent connectivity problems to the site. I've switched out modems, even now using a brand new model, but it's not helping much.

I apologize to the folks that come to tuxmachines looking for the latest in linux and open source news and reviews for not updating the site the passed coupla days. I've been sicker than I've ever been in my life.

I'm so so sorry for the downtime folks. We had a storm roll in last night. A tree blew over onto a powerline and ripped the whole meter box right off the back of my house.

Opps! Changing teaser/excerpt module changed a few things. And I'm not up to going back for two months of posts to adjust.

Lord knows I appreciate all the 'news submissions' I can get. In fact, I've often thought of asking around for a 'Number One' to help me run the site in that area. But I have a few notes for those submitting, especially if you've noticed your submission not published.

Well, I guess everything is about ready, except for a few minor glitches. I haven't looked at possible reasons why the gallery rss feed broke, but it's due for an upgrade so I'm not really concerned about that.

As noted in a comment of the last post we now have mail. I gave up on sendmail and opted for postfix which was really easy to set up.

Well, I guess we'll go with this debian install. I still haven't worked out all the kinks yet cuz my gran'babies came over today and I didn't get a chance to work on things. I took the opportunity to upgrade drupal as you may have noticed too, and it was a much easier upgrade this time.

Well, we have the server up and running on the new install. Some things still aren't functioning properly, but the site is up. We are still ironing out the glitches, so there will still be periods in which we are offline.

If you are a regular to tuxmachines, you have probably noticed the unusual amount of downtime the past 18 hours. I've known for several weeks that a change in server system was imminent and it appears I can no longer delay the upgrade. Expect tuxmachines to be down on and off over the next couple of days beginning tonight.

Tuxmachines is now forced to halt the submission of anonymous news/links at least for a while. I think some new kind of bot is filling up the queue with numerous submissions of various spam. I apologize to the legitimate contributors.

My apologizes for the downtime this afternoon, but the electricity went off and stayed off for approximately 3 hours.

Well, just a short sweet post. That other server was finally brought back online at 8:pm my time after being down since 3:ish am. That's almost 17 hours. They did not answer my email this time, but the first time it happened, they answered my email within 90 minutes and had the site back up shortly after that.

I took the opportunity to test upgrading drupal to 4.7 then 4.7.1 and it was much easier than the upgrade from 4.5.8 to 4.6.6 (now 4.6.7). So you know what that means! Yep, I'm gonna be bring tuxmachines down sometime in the near future, probably tonight whiles traffic is low, and do the upgrade. It really didn't take long to get the basic functionality back, so we won't be down long.