Neil P

Sound fitted class 150 Provincial for £237 in the TMC Black Friday deals
https://www.themodelcentre.com/32-929sf-Bachmann-oo-gauge-class-150-1-2-car-dmu-150115-br-provincial-original-sound-fitted

10 minutes ago, Gedward said:

 

Thanks Neil. I've pretty much explained everything in pictures on my thread The Bovey Saga. Take a look there and happy to answer any questions you may have.

 

 

Great. Thanks. I'll have a look!

5 minutes ago, Gedward said:

A small diorama of Bodmin moor I've been working on.

 

Looks excellent and I like the forced perspective of the higher ground towards the back. Do you have any tips or techniques you could share?

Finally got round to finishing the viaduct (5 arches) and painting it. I added a few small details that I’d forgotten during the design process using Plastikard. 

Can't believe how busy it was today. My children's school was closed, so I thought we'd arrive at lunchtime to beat the crowds - and everyone else clearly had the same idea!

Sadly, I only saw that BRM were renting step-stools for children to stand on as we left, but my boys enjoyed it anyway.

Must say a special thanks to West Hill Wagon Works. I bought a replacement Hunt coupling for a HST and explained it was to replace an identical one I'd broken while fitting it, and they let me have it for free.

10% off everything in the Rails of Sheffield eBay store by using the code BAG10

https://www.ebay.co.uk/str/railsofsheffield

Started work on the viaduct. This is the first section of 6 in primer. It was an 18 hour print, so not a quick job!
 

The joins between each section will be covered by separately printed stonework strips which are proud of the rest of the brickwork.  I have seen something similar on various real-world examples. 
 

I will also print some separate pieces at the top with low walls to contain the track. 
 

I’m finding mapping the stone textures onto more complex shapes a bit of a challenge, and can cause Blender to slow down and crash. 
 

35 minutes ago, Zero Gravitas said:

 

To misquote Bananarama - it’s not what you say, it’s the way that you say it...

 

I agree. I apologised earlier in the thread for anyone I upset with my clumsy choice of words. I was surprised that there wasn’t an offsite backup. Hopefully it will all be smooth sailing with a new hosting provider. 

3 minutes ago, PenrithBeacon said:

You're over thinking it. Something like RMweb needs a high spec PC, good web connectivity, a system manager and a good quality DBA (Database Administrator) and a few others. Well within the capacity of a medium sized company like Warners

The web sourcing firms are overselling their products

At the very least you'd need a handful servers to run a site like this. It's a busy site, so you'd have to separate the databases from the web server. Plus at least one standby server ready to go. And you'd want a SAN with an array of RAID drives for your filing system. Plus a very good symmetrical internet connection and a very good backup connection in case someone drilled through the first one. And some air conditioning to cool it all. And so on...

Or you could just outsource it.
 

2 minutes ago, MarkSG said:

I don't miss those days. The Internet has made offsite backups a whole lot easier 🙂 

I worked for a company where we used to keep a backup onsite in the fire safe, plus offsite backups which staff took home with them. We used to call them "the hamsters", because it was like taking the school pet home to look after, knowing there would be trouble if you lost it.

15 minutes ago, MarkSG said:

Offsite backups are fundamental to any BCP. It's a pity that Warners have had to learn this lesson the hard way.

(I should also point out that I'm not criticising AndyY here. Back in the days when Andy was running RMweb himself and paying for the hosting out of his own pocket, avoiding the additional cost of an offsite backup provider was a risk worth taking for the sake of keeping costs manageable, given that it was just a hobby and not a job. But when Warners took it on, and decided to monetise it further via subscriptions and increased advertising, then it became a commercial service and, as such, needs commercial standards of IT management. And that's a boardroom level responsibility, not that of the people doing the work at the sharp end).

I think you've summed up my thoughts on the matter far better than I managed to with my somewhat clumsy posts last night.

4 minutes ago, Trainshed Terry said:

My name shows twice in the top left hand corner.

 

Terry.

I see your name twice on the left of your posts, and it looks like your avatar/profile picture has disappeared. If you re-upload it that might solve the problem.

56 minutes ago, NHY 581 said:

You clearly have either no idea how keenly this will have been felt and how personally this will have been taken, especially by 'the guy who had to cancel his holiday'. 

Simply in the terms you use, you display a marked ignorance of this forum, the personalities involved and how important it is to them. Either that or you simply choose to ignore it. 

 

To suggest that nothing was done to avoid this or that nothing will be learnt from it is contemptible  and I have to question your motives. 

 

Read the opening post of this thread for a start. 

 

Personally, your views on 'accountability' are irrelevant, unwelcome and not needed. However, they are so diametrically opposed to the sentiments expressed on this thread, along with the esteem in which 'the guy' is held  that they merit comment. 

 

While the rest of us pick up where we left off, move forward and improve on what went before, you  carry on in the past, wondering what happened, seeking your pound of flesh. 

 

You can be *that* person. 

 

But, please, do it quietly. No one, but no one is remotely interested. 

 

 

Clearly I misjudged how personally my comments would be taken, which wasn't my intention, and I apologise for any upset I caused.

I didn't say that nothing was done to avoid this or that not nothing would be learned from it. Clearly emotions are running high and some people are assuming I meant something more significant than I intended. 

42 minutes ago, 57xx said:

 

Why would people have "lost" photos? Every pic I have uploaded to RMWeb was uploaded from my PC and guess what? They are all still in my PC. Nothing is lost.

 

Perhaps when paying a hosting provider to take backups, said hosting provider should do so in a professional manner and not host the backups on the same disc array as the primary data? The data centre wasn't based in Peckham by any chance?

I meant lost from the forum. The photos that members upload, especially when they're explaining how they've modelled something are a great resource, as we all know.

I agree that Dediserve should have done what they were paid to do.

Thanks, ColinK. As they're selling out, I think I might buy one and risk it. They're great looking models.

5 minutes ago, NHY 581 said:

I think to look for a scapegoat within the Rmweb team to 'take responsibility' is grossly unfair and simply wrong to even suggest it. 

I'm not looking for a scapegoat. I feel sorry for the guy who had to cancel his holiday.

There's been a lot of fingers pointed at Dediserve, who have clearly messed up, but I don't understand why it's wrong to suggest that the rmweb team should consider how they might have done things differently.

38 minutes ago, JimC said:

Easier said than done when it comes to terabytes, even low terabytes of data over long distance links. And in some circumstances a regular on line backup may even be enough line data to  affect the hosting costs.
Also restore times over the wire may be horrendous. I recall one disaster recovery I had to do over WAN links which took over a week to get everything back. 
Feel for the guys, been there more than once, got the T shirts.  Its something I wonder about with RAID5. The chances of two separate failures may be tiny, but when all the disks are identical and from the same batch maybe they aren't as tiny as one might hope. 

A daily incremental backup doesn't cost much more in terms of bandwidth. Everything that's been backed up has already been uploaded to the server that day, and it's probably been downloaded to people's web clients many more times. It's not just a "nice to have" if you're running a commercial website.

I agree that restore times over the net can be horrendous, but it would only be required in a disaster-recovery situation, which is exactly where rmweb has ended up. Some hosting providers will let you courier magnetic or flash media to them if required.

Hindsight is a great thing, and I feel sorry for the guy that's had to cancel his holiday, but someone in the organisation should have planned for this.

 

I don't want to be *that* person, and I appreciate all the work the team have put in restoring the site, but are the RMWeb team taking any responsibility for the failure and loss of service or is it just a case of blaming it on Dediserve? After all, a lot of people have lost photos that they uploaded for the benefit of helping other modellers.

Perhaps taking regular backups rather than relying on the hosting provider to do it would be a good idea in future?

Could anyone tell me how easy it would be to change the destination blinds on these? I grew up travelling on these buses in the 80s but my layout is set in Wales. I was thinking of changing the destination to a private charter. 

8 hours ago, JCL said:

Hi Neil, was off the site most of last year. Those retaining walls look great! You say you printed it using an FDM printer, can you give us an up-close photo of them and let me know how you oriented them on your printer - and any other tips you might have. I bought an Ender 3v2 last year, and I've been getting to know it's capabilities. I'm doing pretty well printing rolling stock on it, but haven't tried any buildings yet.

Thanks, JCL. It was your excellent tutorials that got me started on these. The brick walls were done in Tinkercad, but the stone ones in Blender after watching your tutorials.

I oriented the stone walls so they were standing upright while printing - i.e. the orientation they'd be in when being used -  with quite a large raft to keep them still. The photos are already about as close up as I can focus on them. The stones are around 5mm high. I sprayed a coat of Hycote filler primer on them to help smooth them a bit. Once painted and weathered, you can just about see some horizontal banding on close-up photos, but they look perfect to the naked eye.

The brick walls are less successful. I printed them lying flat on their backs (bricks facing upwards), and I think they might be better printed standing up like the stone ones to maximise resolution. To make that work, though, I think I'd need to double the mortar gap between brick courses but leave the gap between adjacent bricks the same. At the moment, the bricks are approximately 1m x 3mm with a 0.2mm gap all round. I'll post a close-up photo later.

I haven't started on the tunnel portals and viaduct yet due to lack of time, but I hope to do so in the next week or so.

On 04/12/2021 at 17:23, racerbill27 said:

Hi...I'm very new to this field.  I appreciate your retaining wall project as it is exactly what I am looking for.  I wonder if you could send a tutorial on creating the stone texture?  

Thanks...Bill   racerbill27 at gmail.com

Sorry - only just spotted your reply. Did you want me to post a short tutorial or have you managed to work it out another way?

Some Black Friday deals from KMS. 
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Some new Amazon Black Friday deals on Hornby stuff 
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Does spraying the whole thing with hairspray or varnish when it’s finished help at all?

Sorry if I've missed the answer elsewhere on this thread. How do you prevent your grass from getting squashed when you lean over your layout? I'm using the Greenscenes applicator, with a dilute PVA base and WWS layering spray. The end result looks okay, but it's pretty fragile.