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.

Well, despite my hesitation, it looks like moving to a new host from my home based server might be a good idea. I received less than a 100 votes, but most said it was somewhat to quite a bit faster with a few stating about the same. No one reports slower response time.

If you've noticed the lack of reviews and slower than usual performance of tuxmachines, there is a good reason. I'm working on an off-site hosting vps in hopes of moving tuxmachines to a faster server and/or larger pipe.

Well, we have the site updated to 4.6.6. It was rough, but we are just about there. I was planning to upgrade to 4.7.x as soon as the modules and bug fixes caught up a little better, but as rough as upgrading Drupal is, it might be a bit longer.

The site was down in the early part of this morning due to maintenance/system software upgrades. It will go down again tonight at approximately the same time and for about the same length of time as I attempt to upgrade the cms.

February 4th was Tuxmachines official one year anniversary. Although I put a site up and added content 6 months prior, it was static and unknown. A year ago I began putting a little content in this little cms called Drupal and we've been growing every since. Tuxmachines continued to showed some growth early part of the quarter, but perhaps has now leveled off some.

Please help Tuxmachines welcome our newest sponsor, Inventio Consulting, IT Training Specialists. Inventio Consulting is a reseller/broker for many of the leading training companies throughout the UK. Their goal is to find the most suitable course to suit your individual needs from the course offerings of all of our partners and to offer savings for these pairings in some cases.

Well, another 3 months has gone by bringing my official time online to 9 months. Boy how time flies. The big news this quarter was the hardware upgrade. I wonder if anyone noticed the site performing a bit better. We're still limited by my bellsouth business dsl pipe, but the server is functioning much snappier now.