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2026.05.30

Firstly, I want to say that I've recently received a lot of very kind and lovely emails from Star Fleet fans in the past few days.
I will be replying as soon as I can, once I have 5 minutes of downtime.

The progress of getting site functionality working on my XAMPP home server originally went very slowly since August of last year, but has accelerated greatly since I got an old, cut-down offshoot of the site engine running on the server, earlier this year.

On Tuesday, Krystal released the xbomber.com domain over to Dynu Systems, so that I could plug it into Dynu's dynamic DNS service and use it to point to the XAMPP server, rather than using crash.ddnsfree.com.
The same day, I got a CA-signed cert for 'proper' SSL applied to it.

Since then, I migrated a backup of the site's database over to the XAMPP server and got the site logging into it.
This allowed me to integrate the site's header script that handles all the variables and database queries, and plug whatever functionality was missing on the XAMPP version of the site.

At that point, it made sense to migrate the "Other" section of the site, which is about 10GB in size, down to the XAMPP local server and use that content to benchtest the server.

Rather than move the thumbnails cache from Krystal down to the XAMPP box, I thought it best to let the local server generate fresh thumbnails.

The additional job that the site's Sphider search engine does for the site now is to scan through the site, triggering thumbnail generation on every page.
For some reason, I expected that getting Sphider running on the XAMPP server would be a bit of a roadblock.
In the end, all that needed doing was copy the application file structure down to the local server and import the database.
After that, I was able to log into Sphider's admin area, change the site URL from "xbomber.co.uk" to "xbomber.com" and away it went.

The site's "Other" section is available on the XAMPP server now. Sphider has been run to trigger the generation of thumbnails across the site, and the site's main menu (on both servers) has been adapted to channel visitors to the local server via the xbomber.com domain.

If you see any problems, let me know, but from my end, the outcome looks pretty good.

Since the XAMPP box serves as our media server, I need to re-add its 3rd spindle disk, which was repaired and was delivered today.
I will switch the site main menu to point back to xbomber.co.uk temporarily, while the server is down for maintenance.

The SFXB Forum is going to stay right here on Krystal Hosting ...
There are quite a lot of reasons behind the decision to try and run the site from a home server and make it part of the "small internet".
One reason is the constant demand against the forum from the DDoS botnets, which has been going on for at least a year now, and shows no sign of going away.
This way, we can allocate all performance resources of the hosting account to running the forum, rather than having to guesstimate what share of account resources the forum should be allowed consume and apply that via phpBB's load settings.

Once the near-term hardware maintenance on the XAMPP box in the lounge has been done, the next phase is to wipe the "Other" file structure from the shared hosting and migrate the Star Fleet content structure and see how we get on with that.

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