The Tux Hunter

Posted on Saturday 1 April 2017

Hey, it's April Fools' Day! As you are reading this, most websites on the Internet are publishing some kind of joke, hoping nobody within their audience notices today's date. Which actually gets kind of complicated in those harsh times where almost every human gets access to the Internet through an NTP-regulated smartphone. Ah, what a wonderful time to be alive!
This year, at TuxFamily's, we decided not to do any prank; historically, we have used April Fools' Day to threaten our estimated hostees with various calamities, downtimes and heretic decisions; what kind of hoster would do that each and every year to their hostees? That sounds inhuman. Are we inhumane? No we're not. That's why this year, instead of a silly joke, we provide you with the closest you can get to a guided tour within the TuxFamily universe, namely the infrastructures and the staff behind your favourite hoster.

Let's start with the infrastructures: our main datacenter is located in Poo, a charming town in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh:

Our main machine room, during dry season:

These guys are former interns who, alas, left us too early during the latest monsoon.

For redundancy purposes, we have three other datacenters in Nowhere, Oklahoma. All three can be seen on this picture, with engineers about to lay an additional optical link to the first one:

This is our network backbone; as you know, TuxFamily lives on your donations and thus always strives to save money by NOT purchasing useless stuff such as fancy racks or needlessly long cables.

It would be boring to present you with pictures of all of our servers, so instead let's focus on our most powerful machine, which is also the one we check, inspect and clean most often.

Similarly, you probably do not really care what we use to work: still, here is a picture of Xavier's workstation:

and another one of Sylvain's workstation:

But enough hardware! Surely, we are proud of our infrastructures, but we never forget how useless they would be without the true magic brought by our dream teams:

First, let's introduce our PR (Public Relations) team, i.e. the guys we send to various events such as RMLL, Solutions Linux, etc. to represent TuxFamily and explain how great it can be for you:

(yes, that was "bring your child at work"-day).

By the way, they happen to be the people whom you could have rented for a night if our last year's idea of a "service that will enable you to bid for your favorite TuxFamily staff member" had become a reality. Too bad nobody liked the idea.

As you probably know already, people convinced they ought to be hosted by TuxFamily have to submit a description of their project, which is reviewed by our moderation team:

Yes, these are the guys who either accept or reject your demands. Similarly to the PR team, they all have extensive knowledge of communication and human "sensibilities" and are so dedicated to their task they sometimes travel and "knock" to the rejected candidates' doors to better explain why the project was rejected and why it is, alas, "strictly unnecessary to further insist". And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why it is so important to fill your exact residential address in TuxFamily's panel!

Of course, it would be unforgivable to forget our sysadmins! Always deeply concerned with privacy matters, be it for your data or for themselves, they expressed the wish to remain anonymous while still providing a nice group photography:

These guys are the ones who, thanks to our state-of-the-art monitoring systems, wake up at 4:37 in the morning to extinguish the fire that started at 22:12.

Last and clearly the least is Serge, our latest intern, whom we appreciate less for his programming skills (although he is quite good at "spit programming", a peculiar variant of "speed programming") than for his astonishing survival abilities:

Way to go, Serge!

That's it for your guided tour within the premises of TuxFamily. Sadly, since Serge's drool is drowning our last functioning keyboard, we are currently unable to publish the exact licenses of this article and its pictures until tomorrow.

Edit: it was of course our usual April Fools' prank; our main datacenter is in France, those famous actors do not work for TuxFamily at all and we do not send gangsters to break your wrists when your project gets refused (that does not constitute a reason not to read the FAQ before applying, though). On the other hand, who can prove we do not have a llama in the team?

Network outage

Posted on Friday 17 February 2017, at 08:57 UTC

We are currently experiencing a network outage on all of our main services. We don't know what happened yet, we will keep you in touch.

Edit 2017-02-17 10:05 UTC: We are back!, it was due to fiber cut on two fibers which were supposed to be on two distinct paths but in the end obviously were not.

Edit 2017-02-17 22:55 UTC: And it's down again.

Edit 2017-02-18 03:12 UTC: Up!, it should be the last time, that was probably for the definitive fiber repair.