ENTERPRISE

A shout out to all who wish to Donate on a recurring basis. I have now setup the appropriate subscriptions for doing so. Please see here: https://forums.extremehw.net/subscriptions/ You can donate in increments of 10,25,50,75 & 100, of whatever your currency is depending on your locations. As per the description of the Donor sub, for your generosity you will be recognised with a badge in your profile (This will exist in the signature as an award). I need to create the artwork for this, so this will not show immediately. More to come soon. A huge thanks once again for everyone's support!

Thanks guys. For ease of those who are able/want to make a recurring donation, I will setup way to do this later today. I will also be investigating our new server today. Thank goodness for weekends lol.

I have no data to support my claims but I would agree that in my experience WD Blue drives are consistently an issue. As it happens my brother in laws laptop was using a WD Blue HDD. I swapped it out for an SSD yesterday as it was on its way out and the laptop was dead slow. Granted WD blue is essentially their budget line, so I expect lower performance, but not more failures.

Known about this for a good while and have been patiently waiting, annoyingly Asrock are dragging their heels on releasing the BIOS for my board.

Hey man, more ways to help than just money. I did get your PM. Will get to that soon Really appreciate it guys. For all those who wish to donate on a monthly or on a whenever basis, it is best done via : https://forums.extremehw.net/clients/donations/ I will see about making this section more visible.

I certainly appreciate the thought and idea. Migrating to another forum software would be fairly disastrous to the sites health and growth. Migrations are always a setback and unless you have a big dev crew to get everything back to "Normal", migrations are costly for those reasons and more Ultimately the cost of the software is a minimal issue in the big scheme of things Appreciate the thought bud! Ad integration is on the way. However I need to check in on that. Apparently all is green for go, but Google has to learn the site before ads pop up, however that is taking longer than expected and needs looking at. A little like a migration, this can be a setback so far as search engines and SEO. Mothballing a site/replacing it with a temporary version would virtually bring your standing with Google to Zero. However I see your logic so far as a strictly saving money point of view Appreciate it Thanks bud! ........................... I just want to say that the support is very heartwarming and just goes to show what community is all about. I thank you all for your kind words and support of every kind! After thinking about it and speaking with my partner, we both know why I founded this community and both agree that walking away completely would be a mistake. That being said, it is also clear that I need to better delegate some of the sites operations to a staff for the sites wellbeing, as well as my own. It is a win win. From a financial point of view. Hopefully once the Ads come in these will help. However I do not foresee that making much of a dent (at least until we see growth). So I think for the community to remain and prosper, I would have to take those who are able/offered up on there generosity with helping with site costs. If you are happy to help with costs, please post here, as some of you have or send me a PM. Regarding Staff and helping me to run the site, leave this with me to come up with positions and we can go from there. My goal is to be active, but ultimately being a watchful eye. So far as site development. This is halted, but was halted anyway as there was nothing else to be done at this point so far as site features. Monthly running costs will be reviewed and we will be moving to a more cost effective hosting solution, possibly VPS rather than full dedicated. SEO will be stopped. @iamjanco. I will speak with you regarding server side bits and bobs via PM. More to come, this is a post from my phone lol. With gratitude, E

You have to pay if you have custom Font Awesome Icons. Which we do as there were no suitable free ones available. Font Awesome have a lot of icons...but typically not the ones I wanted lol. The forum software is the smallest cost, at least as a base platform and going for a well known and supported platform was paramount. There are loads of options but this was the best of the lot in my opinion. Yes, they do offer there own all in one hosting now. However, kiss goodbye any custom dev work as there cloud services don't support it :(. Most all in one services are like that. If you want full control over the sites shape and form, you are better off with dedicated hosting.

Squarespace has its place. It is great for quick ecommerce sites and the like as well as simple content hosting. However those sorts of "One package fit all" type of service allow for zero custom development and plugins and is not ideal/cannot host communities. As documented the actual cost of the Platform (Invision) is small, a little like Squarespace. The larger costs come from the other items listed mostly. Yes you are correct, we should have content, competition, social media etc like co-ordinators that have duties and should anything come up, that is only really when a founder/owner would get involved. Though of course these positions are usually voluntary, like on OCN.

1. Buy me a winning lottery ticket 2..... So a breakdown on costs that I can recall at this moment, but I believe this to be a correct list. Monthly Costs £150 - Server proactive maintenance (I have a really decent guy for this who I was happy to pay to keep it off my hands and he is far more experienced in this that I) £20 - CloudFlare £180 - Dedicated Server (Dedicated over cheaper VPS as originally wanted a rock solid platform, this could be reduced obviously) £150 - Basic SEO (Was £300-400 at full tilt) £500 GBP/ $616 USD Total Yearly Costs $100 Invision Community $99 Fonticon Icons (Font Awesome) $40 Tag System $35 Discord Integration $20 Marketplace $30 Carousel Slider $60 Video/Stream System $25 AWS Mailing Sytem Total $409 USD/ £330 GBP These are running costs. This does not include bespoke development for the site or one off feature costs. Custom Dev which would include things like : Rig Builder Latest News/Review Blocks Award System (Ready but not active yet) Dark Theme/Theme Adjustments EHW Premium (Any and all perks included in Premium packages) Obviously these are one off costs for custom dev. The other one off cost features....is another list. ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... Perhaps my mistake in all this is trying to do everything, which I have been guilty for...forever lol. I have no issue with remaining the owner and doing what I can moving forward. But If that were to be the case I think we need to get a staff going here and re-structure possibly what we have on the site. A NEED vs want. I would love to keep all of it as it shapes the site well. But beggars cannot be choosers and ultimately it depends if people are wanting to collectively pitch in and help out etc. There is of course no obligation to do so.

I can certainly answer those questions I will get some details later as im just heading to work.

If the site went toward closure rather than new ownership, the data would be kept safe for sure Regardless of the sites future, no reason the HWBOT, Folding or Discord need to be affected So far as costs to keep this site going, there are monthly and annual costs which I will be calculating. Indeed, there is a LOT of competition out there, the landscape has changed for better or worse. As you say its a struggle to build a large membership and I knew that and accepted from the start that it would be a challenge. Actually, not sure regarding OCN. It started as one guy and then there was a small team of guys moving forward. However the owner of OCN at the time was in a better financial position than I am and had some great contacts. It make a big difference! Once I have something together I will send you a message Thanks for putting yourself forward. I appreciate everyone's kind words my hope is for the site to remain and its what im working towards.

Release

Thanks bud. I did manage to sort it out eventually and did a good amount of reading on L2ARC and ZFS Log. L2ARC is pointless if you are getting the high 90th percentile hit rate on ZFS and your RAM.

**Edit** New direction found as below, all thanks to the community helping with site costs and donating staffing time! If you wish to donate to help towards the running of the site, please use our Donations Page

So I have TrueNas installed and migrating the data over. I had a nightmare with the user permissions as I am so used to a different system. So I went back to basics and got the main admin setup so I could at least get all the files over. Right now I have a dataset for each share that I have. I assume that if I want to restrict other users from access data in a share, I want alter the Share permissions and not the Dataset permissions ? Looks like ZFS makes good use of the RAM! I have been reading up on whether or not it is sensible to set up one of the SSD's in the system into an L2ARC, but I have not been able to come to a conclusion as of yet. Has anyone played with this that may have some feedback on whether or not it helps or hinders performance ? Thanks, E

Yeah, likely a bad cable. They can go bad fairly easily if not in a static position, such as fixed to a wall or in conduit. If you have them coiled up and used over and over (I do) then they can go bad, especially CAT5 I find but that is because they are so easy to bend back and fourth which will wear at the copper wires inside. Sheilded/Sheathed cable is far hardware to bend, thus preserves the copper more so. CAT6 S/FTP cables I love, strong, sheilded but not as flexible, though you can still get a good enough radius to go round the corner of a wall, so it is not like it does not move at all, but can be a little more of a fight lol. As @bonami2 has said, assuming there isn't funky drivers issues (Highly unlikely), then you will be fine with a new cable. You can get cable testers to ensure correct pairing and connection. Google will easily find one "RJ45 Cable Tester" But I wouldn't invest in one as its likely just a cable which is easier and quicker to replace. My other advice is to also have spare cables on hand to test if you think you have a bad cable as you can validate that with a spare very quickly.

This is part of my TrueNas venture to consolidate separate machines into one for improved power consumption and reduction in heat output in the office lol

Awesome! Very informative, thanks for your insight. At the moment im leaning towards TrueNas Core. Mostly as my server will be a NAS with additional services. My current hardware choices were based on a RAID like setup. Ideally RAID 10, Striped with a Mirror. I cannot recall the name of the system TrueNas uses on ZFS which is essentially RAID 10 but it would be the way I would go as im looking for maximum throughout with redundancy. I will have 128Gb RAM for caching needs or the 2x 1TB SSD's. Obviously a RAID array is no replacement for a backup, so I will have a second NAS used for onsite backup and I have remote backup too. I have sat and watched a few videos on TrueNas and it makes sense to me, so it is likely I will go that route for the time being.

Without looking at the utility, there is one I use called Winaero Tweaker. Allows you to tweak lots of Windows settings, I would be surprised if Windows Update wasn't one of them. The other suggestions would be to alter Windows Update options through Group Policy as there are vastly more settings for most Windows components in that area, including Windows Update. Check: https://businesshelp.avast.com/Content/Products/AfB_Management_Consoles/PatchManagement/RecommendedWindowsUpdateConfiguration.htm

Yeah, in short term if you clear the notifications on desktop, that will follow through on mobile as it is a per account preference, not browser dependent.

From what I can see, it is not available on mobile. Looks like a by design sort of thing. So this is does not look to be a bug. I will see if this can be something we can add on mobile with custom dev. However this will be put on a wish list type thing for when resources become available as this is not a priority item :)

Thanks, I think I know exactly what you mean now, even without looking at my cooler. Will keep it in mind. This one certainly fits a lot more snug in place as I would expect it to, so thats good news. I have the second CPU fan coming on Saturday. By the way, on your cooler, do both of your fans have grills in front of them ?

Are these two little feet on the shroud assembly? I have not got to set it up just yet. Long story short, I was not happy with the fan assembly I had, it always felt sort of loose when put into place. So I had to do a swap with the company who sent me a replacement unit. However to my frustration, the unit they sent did not have the second CPU fan.....D'oh. So now they are shipping me a second fan for me to put into the unit. After that I should be good to go....Fingers crossed.

That is certainly not a common thing. I have not had nor heard of Cache being damaged during stress testing. Hopefully its just a CPU issue that will be easily solved with a swap out. I have a replacement CPU fan assembly coming today. The one I had was tempramental and would run full speed at times.

Nope, no let down buddy, I get how precious time can be I am glad you managed to get it sorted it looks like. There are tonnes of plugins for WordPress which I will investigate more with respects to extra functions and ease of writing Sorry I did not get to your PM sooner.