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On a slightly lighter note, I’ve just added a new server.

It’s a bit of a whopper and whilst I don’t think there were particularly any speed problems, this box also houses a DVD download service, two TV stations and a radio stream and I got the impression the current server was creaking at the seams a bit.

In any case I ran out of space for DVDs and the new one is the only box which had enough diskspace available. It’s about 4x as powerful and as actually quicker than my fastest pc at home which is quite impressive.

It’s also got a better version of the server OS which is already turninng out to come with other goodies I hadn’t expected, including windows video streaming, pop mail server and other stuff.

I’ve got to build a social network for a client soon and I suspect “Community server” will be the platform. That same system would apparently be able to import these existing forums and potentially add a lot of extra functionality. I know this has been mentioned before somewhere so this is progress in that respect.

As an example, Community server is used to run parts of myspace. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a huge fan of myspace and (I sincerely hope) we’re not headed for sparkly backgrounds, bling, and webcam-girls, but it might mean we can still have the forums but also have other functionality more widely available – e.g *everyone* being able to host or swap pictures rather than the current method, a while back TC mentioned an idea using joomla which is the same sort of deal, but my server’s not linux and community server looks like the plaftorm of choice for windows.

There’s an “express” version avaialble for free so I should be able to set up some sort of test we can have a look at and see whether it would provide a worthwhile improvement.

I’ll know more once I’ve investigated it for the client …