Dear Group,
As many of you know, I am a frequent contributor to the list. About three
months ago, we had a long thread on the need for customer support for Orion.
In late June, I contacted Karl Avedal with Ironflare about my company
providing support for Orion. Karl was very encouraging, so my company
decided to go forward with this venture.
Last Friday our support site went up, www.elephantwalker.com. In the site,
we provide
a free public application for users to post their questions about Orion.
Users
can up-load files to the forum as well as "bury" a topic when the problem is
solved...a very useful feature when a problem is solved.
We hope that Elephantwalker Support Site will be useful and more reliable
than
the email list.
We also offer subscription-based customer support for the Orion(tm)
Application
Server. Users may purchase on-line or phone-based support packages. In
addition, we offer a client-site, two-day Orion class in the San Francisco
Bay
area
Join us at www.elephantwalker.com, its free! As far as reliability is
concerned, the site is hosted at Upnetworks in San Francisco, a telecon
grade facility. This means that even during a power failure or natural
disaster the site will continue to operate. We use two separate servers for
the site for reliability. The back-end is Oracle which is running on a raid
configured server for reliability. This site won't go down. As far as band
width is concerned, Upnetworks has several OC-64 network connections to the
internet.
Many have asked what technology we use to power the site. Here is a short
list:
1. Redhat 7.1 with the enterprise kernel is used on the application servers.
2. Two Orion application servers are used to serve up the web pages and
enterprise application.
3. The enterprise application is a distributable forum application so that
if one server goes down, the other server will continue to serve up web
pages. The users will never know that their server has gone done, since the
session are shared across the cluster. This is unlike another well known
forum application, Jive's, which is not distributable.
4. The forum application allows users to up-load files and have lengthy
forum messages. We have imposed a limit of 50k per message, and 2 MB for
up-loads, but our technology has no limit on the message size or file size.
The application is run completely within Orion as an ear file.
5. Our back-end is Oracle 8.1.7, but we do not use any special Oracle
features.
For those of you on the list, don't despair, I will continue to contribute
to the list.
regards,
the elephantwalker
