Virtualization Ahoy! (Patreon)

Hi pals,

I wanted to give you an update on the new hardware I purchased. It's now all set up (minus some stuff damaged in shipping), and I've completed the slow and lengthy process of migrating all the physical machines to virtual machines. YTMND is now entirely virtualized, and we are also managing our own router and switch, making many things significantly easier in the long run. 

The next step, which we've already started, is to set up new virtual machines with updated software and operating systems. I've been committing all of the random changes from the last 5+ years into SVN, and when that's all done I can convert to git, and start on the necessary changes to the code.

As for re-opening the main site, there are some things I feel need to be done first:

1.  Get the site working on a modern version of apache, purchase HTTPS certs, etc.
2.  Update the password hashing algorithm (currently SHA1+Salt)
3.  Update some various bits of code for PHP 7 compatibility.
4.  Finish a secret new feature I hope everyone will like.

Hopefully it won't take too much time but I've only had time to work on weekends and I haven't had many of those lately due to other obligations. That said, it's coming along!

So now with that out of the way, we're left with a bunch of rackmount servers that we're not using. I thought we might raffle them off to patrons who are interested in owning a piece of YTMND history. There are three servers right now of varying levels of power, they might even be useful for a few more years. If any of you are interested, let me know in the comments.

The servers are:

The former YTMND sites server (which later became www.ytmnd.com)
The YTMND DB (which is a beast of a machine)
The YTMND Content Server (which hosted content.ytmnd.com)