Service Packs?

[Masta]

Absolutely great site in many ways. Many of times the old versions will come in handy. Even with the pros and cons of old apps, they still function better. What do you think about a site, "about us" page? I was wondering if it is with in the sites juridiction to host any Microsoft service packs like one and two? My guess is Microsoft would not tolerate it lol. Have a good one

~Mike

[Goslow]

Do you mean a page like this, About (http://www.oldversion.com/about.php)

Are those service packs (of whatever,there are many) not available from microsoft? it would hardly seem worth it if they were

[locustfurnace]

Hosting Service Packs would eat up a lot of disk space as well as bandwidth. Some of the more recent SP's from Microsoft for their latest OS's tip the scale over 100megs.
For example, the latest Windows XP SP2 for English and Hebrew Languages is 266megs.

As far as Microsoft's view on hosting SP'2. I don't believe they would object. As one can easily find various service packs hosted on many websites already.

[Masta]

I did not see the, "about us" link at the bottom of the page. Service pack one is 128 mb, and service pack two is 272 mbs (non hebrew). What is the bandwith limit for users on this site? I capped at over 200k a sec. The only benefit to host service packs is that if your not a microsoft genuine user one can not download anything! Do you use host vBulletin on the http server? Awesome format by the way.

~Mike

[locustfurnace]

The bandwidth I spoke of is not the speed at which you are downloading at, but at how much bandwidth per month is purchased.
If 50gigs a month is purchased, the site has 50 gigs they can transfer data to users.
Downloading something like Winamp, at 2 megs, will not eat up to much bandwidth, hence more users can download from the site.
But hosting a file which will eat up 200megs per download, and with as many people who may download it, the site will have to close down early in the month while the bandwidth recycles or pay out of pocket for more capacity.

Plus, the site would probably be asked to host more than just MS Windows XP service packs. How many service packs were there for NT4? 2000?

Not sure what you mean by saying "if your not a microsoft genuine user one can not download anything! "

If you mean, if one is running a warez release of an OS, one can not download from anywhere? or just from Microsoft.

[Masta]

What I am asking about is bandwidth limits. For example, this site receives many hits and users…Say there are forty users downloading at any give one moment some will transfer at 200k/s and others at 50k/s etc. Do you cap (limit) the transfer rate the users have to for example, no more than 250k/s?

I have had experiences with some, “store bought” end user operating system software (Microsoft windows XP home editions) that did not upgrade properly with the service packs. Go figure?! Now I run red hat and server 2k3 with dual.

What do you think about using a web integrated ftp server for users to transfer files on this awesome site?

How is vBulletin hosted? Http? FTP? XML?
~Mike

[OldVersion.com Admin]

We have recently purchased an unmetered server at servermatrix.com for $289/month which allots us with 20mbps of bandwidth and 80GB of space on a 2.4GHz Celeron. This does allow us the capacity to host larger files, and if demand is high enough I do not see a reason why OldVersion.com cannot host Service Packs of Windows. Recently, it was suggested that OldVersion.com host all the Windows Updates for 98 and this does not seem much different to me.

We do not cap our visitors download speeds, this is usually self-regulated due to the maximum capacity of 20mbps. To better illustrate this, let me outline an example.

Let us say that there are 50 people downloading 50 different files at this time. That means that there is 2.5Megabytes of bandwidth available per second for those 50 people (20mbits /8 = 2.5mbytes). So 2,500kBs/50 = 50kB/s. Our bandwidth limit would automatically cap everyone at 50kB/s in this particular scenario.

An unmetered server does allow us a good deal of room to expand, however we are not entirely happy with the network we are currently on. We have been jumping from different server providers for the past three months (as in, this is our third different unmetered server in the past three months) and none so far have provided us with a stable network that is quick, efficient, with virtually no down time. I am not entirely sure, but statistics have shown this site to have been down for three hours yesterday, and it's often not as responsive as I would like it to be. Can you guys back me up on this or is it just me?

Also, if anyone knows of a reasonably priced server on a good stable network, please go ahead and give us suggestions in this thread.

[Masta]

Well said, I enjoyed the good information. Do you know how vbulletin works and what about an integrated web-file transfer protocall for transfering files instead of old slow http transfers? Sounds like server matrix is nice, but who funds this?

~Mike

[OldVersion.com Admin]

Well said, I enjoyed the good information. Do you know how vbulletin works and what about an integrated web-file transfer protocall for transfering files instead of old slow http transfers? Sounds like server matrix is nice, but who funds this?

~Mike

vBulletin works using PHP and the posts are stored in a mySQL database. It's pretty simple to install. After you buy it, you can follow simple directions available at http://www.vbulletin.com/

If you have any specific questions, I can answer those for you. Http transfers work well enough for now, I see no reason to switch to FTP as many people encounter problems transferring from FTP (myself included).

The server is funded from the advertising revenue generated by OldVersion.com. Everytime any of you guys click an ad, it helps this site out, so please click any that may interest you.