The Static content is now back up and the site looks nice again.

Apologies for the mishap!

Gareth

One of the new sites added this month is UCZ Paintball who have locations in Newton Abbot, Exeter and Plymouth. All their sites are UKARA registered and offer the widest choice of playing zones, terrain and environments for own-gunners to battle in: from villages, trenches, large woodlands, bridges and vehicle convoys to adrenaline pumping indoor rooms, corridors, stair wells, balconies and ambush holes.

All three UCZ venues run regular airsoft walk-on days and their Exeter venue, the Bunker, also runs weekly heart-pounding evening games on Wednesday nights.

Costs for all walk-ons are a low £15 entry fee and they also have BB’s, pryotechnics and gas at reasonable prices to ensure you can make the most of each and every game day.

Vist their website or Airbana for more info!

The infrastructure is the same and IPv6 connectivity is provided by SixXS.

For those of you that have IPv6 connectivity there is an AAAA record for www.airbana.co.uk [and blog.airbana.co.uk] so no need to use the IPv6 literal [] URL.

Does this make Airbana the first IPv6 airsoft site?

Due to the feedback received the site will (in the future) check for an XMLRPC file first and if that succeeds it will not display the locally stored prices or the “Sorry, but the site admin has not yet added any prices” message.

Due to the increased concern over minor vandalism the next major version of Airbana (Version 4) will allow Site Admins to request that a site be locked from public edit.

The site has been well received with Blog posts, link backs, forum posts, emailed suggestions and best of all lots of usage!

62,841 unique visitors!!
Over 600 edits [a lot of these were the same thing being edited several times]
Over 30 events added
Over 1000 text’s sent!
12 new sites added

Hopefully Airbana is now the most up to date and comprehensive Airsoft map available. If it is missing any sites then by all means add it, I can’t imagine that anyone would object to free publicity.

I don’t have an e.t.a for Version 4 as I’m not only quite busy with work but I’m working on developing the API etc so the community as a whole can collaborate and share information.

If anyone has any suggestions or would like to help with Beta testing, blogging or helping maintain the site please email me here: gareth@airbana.co.uk

Bug: New sites with the same name as an existing site do not have corresponding Wiki’s

Cause: Wiki’s are created with a Key constraint of the Unique ID of the Site. The methodology used to ‘fetch’ the key of the new site did not take into account certain conditions resulting in an existing site being linked to multiple wiki entries whilst the new site had none.

Fix: Change in the way Site Key is generated and acquired during Site / Wiki creation.

Here are some quick stats:
4474 unique visitors
172 Edits
8 Events added
230+ SMS’s sent
6 feature suggestions

I’d like to say a big thank you to the Beta Testers, Arnie from Arnies Airsoft and most importantly my fellow Airsofters!

You can access the site here: www.Airbana.co.uk

You no longer need to signup to Add Sites, receive SMS’s or anything like that. Information such as your mobile number is stored on your local computer (cookies for those who care).

There is a lot more AJAX in the site now so it should feel a lot smoother and there is now an array of servers in the back end of things to keep it running fast.

The XMLRPC functionality is now complete so whenever someone clicks on the ‘Prices’ link for a site in Airbana the XMLRPC function will trigger and request http://yoururl/xmlrpc.php and render those prices straight into the Airbana interface ensuring you have the very latest prices on show! For those of you who don’t want to get involved in programming just use the Airbana XMLRPC Generator and upload it to your site!

I’ve put together a how-to that for the moment should whet your appetite for when the site goes fully live and help new users in the long run.

Version 3 also includes an Application Programming Interface which will allow you to expose / utilise Airbana Functionality on your own sites (or Desktop widgits / whatever). Version 3.1 of the API (already in progress) will allow remote clients to trigger push elements (changing elements in the database) and User Comms (sending SMS’s etc).

Users with standards compliant browsers (firefox, opera etc) will be able to make use of the ‘One Click Co-ordinates’ feature when adding a site, simply click on ‘Add Site’, zoom into where your site is then right click, the co-ordinates are saved and you are onto Stage 2!

In response to the defacement attack earlier in the month I’ve had to resort to using Captcha’s on some elements of the site.

Adding Event Dates (Retail sites can have ‘events’ now too!) is now simplified, the map is now also capable of displaying multiple events for one site in a given time period (oversight of mine). You can also edit Event Details upto and including the date of the event. Events that have happened in the past can not be edited.

Site operators who don’t want to program an XML formatter for entries in their DB (or don’t have a DB backend) can add upto 4 prices (although the format is quite simple to add more) and then click the green ‘Go’ button.

Simply copy and paste this text into a file called XMLRPC.php and drop it into the root directory of your website (the same place where the index.html / index.php is).

Hardware

All Airbana Servers are running as follows:
Intel Core 2 Duo’s
2Gb of RAM (Web Servers)
4Gb of RAM (DB Servers)
RAID 1 SATA Disks

Software

Dynamic content servers
CentOS 5.2
MySQL 5.0.45
Apache 2.2.3
PHP 5.1.6

Static Caching Servers
Windows Server 2008
IIS7

Network Infrastructure

The network at the Data center
Cisco 6509
Foundry ServerIron Load Balancer
Multi Gigabit Peers with Linx, Tiscali and Level3

Layout

It wouldn’t be a blog post without pictures: