The State of the SOL

Friends, MSTies, Fellow AVs, lend me your ears.
Why thank you, these sculpty ears are very realistic.

So, where do we stand as a theater?

First of all, we are 644 strong as a group (666 if you look in the group search results). That makes us one of the larger groups in SL, though by no means the largest.

We have 151 episodes in the player at the moment, with several more additions pending. Wikipedia lists 198 total so we're closing in on the whole set.

So why are some pending? Simply put, we're out of room.

For quite a while now our streaming server and bandwidth has come courtesy of SLCN.tv, the Second Life Cable Network. Frankly if you're got a viewer, you should get down to the host segment end of the SOL and pick up a free SLCN screen. Wiz Nordberg and Texas Timtam have provided all of us a great service, but we've exhausted the space available on their server, and so we go out to search for a land of our own.

Just as the space issue began to make itself known, I attended a conference hosted by Sun Microsystems (an enterprise computer systems manufacturer). While attending a reception hosted by Sun, I won the door prize: a shiny new server! What luck, right when we need a server one is bestowed upon us by the riffing gods!

Now as a door prize, we have to maintain pretty low hopes for it to have all the bells and whistles, so I put the call out to all of you to help with the costs of upgrading the machine's components, namely the hard-drives and memory (we were lucky and Sun says the server has the best available processor). You all came through swimmingly, donating over 55,000 Lindens so far, worth roughly $200 US. I've used the revenue generated by my Tube-O-Rama venture to make up the rest of the needed funds and we've bought around $800 worth of parts so that the server will have 8Gb of RAM, 1Tb of redundant RAID-1 storage and a dual-core Opteron at 2.8 ghz. That all works out to a metric buttload of awesome server capable of handling all the episodes for some time to come.

So what's next? Well, the RAM has arrived, but I'm waiting on the shipment of hard-drives. I expect them this week. I then have to send our upgrade parts to the company that will be hosting our server and arrange for Sun to ship the server to them. The hosting company will then install our upgrade parts, install our server and let me know it's all ready to go. I will then go through the process of building the software that makes everything work, load all the episodes over to the new server, and change the video player to start using the new server.

Hosting is going to cost around $100 a month US, but so far the fundraiser posters and my Tube-O-Rama sales have left me confident that going forward we'll be able to cover the costs without worry.

While I have you I would like to make sure we thank the following people:

Myriad Qunhua - The Hostess With the Mostess.
Razzap Snookums - Provider of the land the SOL rests on.
Kenbro Utu - Builder of much of the SOL.
Dallas Flimflam - Builder of much of the SOL.
Zack Hodgson - Builder of the SOL hallway.

And of course Wiz and Texas for a whole lotta support along the way.

And you, you've been there attending the events, donating to the posters, making this all worthwhile. I hope you keep coming to the Friday events and maybe try a Saturday event on for size, keep inviting your friends out, and keep tossing a little Linden love our way.

TTFN,
Squeebee Wakawaka