dovac needs a life

So I decided to stop hosting visual novel translation sites.

All projects/sites hosted have 89 days to move.

I do not like what I see in the visual novel scene and I don’t want to be associated with it anymore. It is as simple as this:

1) I own the server
2) I choose who I host
3) I shoulder legal responsibility

I don’t want the legal responsibility anymore so that is why everyone is being kicked off.

Figured a new blog post would be helpful with all the changes lately.

As you’re aware we switched domain names (and servers too!), with that I decided the site and servers should get some updates in.

1) We were running on lighttpd + fastcgi deployment of Ruby on Rails, this was normal back in 2006, fast forward to 2012, and no one does it anymore. So it was decided we use nginx for frontend and unicorn as the glue between the app and webserver.
2) ssl support, lighttpd has/had poor ssl support so I wanted to move off that asap as well.
3) We had some sites hosted using PHP and I wanted to separate them off to different VMs. So thanks to Ac-town too for helping out setting up ganeti which allows us to provision VMs, now I can run PHP sites* that do not interfere with each other.

The move to nginx was problematic due to the fact that our download server had a custom lighttpd module that generated zip files on the fly, nginx has that too but required code changes that quite frankly I wouldn’t know how to implement at all since I’m not a programmer. Luckily (or THANK GOD) edogawaconan decided to modernize our code and had already gotten the zip generation to work with nginx. So I just had to pull in the change and then get nginx complied with the mod_zip plugin.

Then it got complicated, zip downloads just hanged there when ssl was enabled. Turns out it was a cookie problem after many hours of debug (again many thanks to edogawaconan)

So now we have a somewhat modernized stack which can be extendable in the future.

*Want free hosting from me? Leave a comment on how I can contact you and why you think you deserve the hosting and I’ll decide to host it or not.

so imouto is no more

it moved to a new url

I’m sure you can find it if you look around.

Its server moving time again! Hey its a monthly thing ok? Well not this time, this will be the last move for the next 12 months.

I’ve decided to do a Lease to Own program with a local colo, it’ll save me almost 300 bucks a month. I think this is worth the hassle of moving to a new server. Plus if I have any hardware problems its a quick 20min drive down the freeway with replacement parts.

This is also a big change as well, as some people are aware I host a few sites all on the same system (IQDB, TLwiki, Ammy, mirrormoon, and others). I’ve decided that moving forward I’m going to use Virtual Machines to separate the PHP and Ruby on Rail apps. Which software I will use to setup the VMs is undecided but I’m leaning to KVM. Originally I wanted to use Vmware ESXi but I don’t have globs of RAM to throw around on all the systems. If people have suggestions on which stack to use please let me know! (No cloud hosting stuff, I only have one server, so I don’t want to run openstack or something like that without multiple systems)

I also have another important announcement!….except I haven’t worked out all the details, so once that is done I’m going to write yet another blog post! Oh god I’m writing too much lately.

So I said to myself not to involve myself with this whole Visual Novel drama that’s hitting lately, but I finally got around to read some blog posts from various sites and let me just say a few things about it:

“I am so naive.” <– that is a understatement of the year, if you wanted to “promote” this directly to the artist/writer/whatever on any commercial project, they would say talk to the publisher.

“The thing that tipped me off was how much Makoto emphasized the licensing of existing fan translations.” <– ianal, but they do not even need to notify that they’re reusing someone else’s illegal translation, this is simply a courtesy to improve PR.

“‘Youre killing the industry!’ <– is utter bullshit.” <– Actually there is no industry, you’ll be lucky to break even on costs. I can’t quote numbers from my sources but it is not a pretty picture.

“but those massive advertising budgets on nyaatorrents and oreno.imouto” <– I can’t comment on nyaa but the “massive advertising budget” covers less then 30% of my server bills