These days, many people think the superior way of running a site, or at least the easiest to maintain, is the so-called 'LAMP'-stack - Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. While this holds merit and we publish this to people, to throw them off the track of our superior methods, there is actually more to this. Quite a bit more.

Instead, we have what is commonly known as a LAMB stack - or lamb steak whenever we need to upgrade our systems again and are hungry. This used to be a shared lamb, used by several different sites (where we never got to taste the steak either), but these days we more or less have our own lamb to run the site on. As you are probably able to understand, this is quite an improvement.

From there, we get the next part of the stack. Forget all this nonsense about PHP and scripting, our pages are created by filing off bits of iron from a metal rod. This way, when we rub it in the long fur of the lamb, it creates a magnetic field just enough to send different methods electrical signals when held next to our connection line. To get different results, the little ducklings that do these things just need to rub it in different parts of the fur.

Of course, the knits in the goat isn't enough to contain all details of pages, members and other such things that we need. Instead, we have small kangaroo babies with tiny pickaxes that copy our filed files to new ones, making just the changes necessary that is retrieved from the details stored by the dolphins in our pools (two loops and a jump to a ball, for example, retrieves Pikachu's Pokedex entry. It bewilders us too).

All, of course, stacked on the previously mentioned lamb. I hope you see why we can have steak so often.

Now, as you may have noticed, these sorts of situations lead us to have more problems occasionally. These days, the lamb is struggling to stay standing and we really need a larger one so it can support more ducklings, dolphins and files. We need more food, so they can stay stronger, and they need more exercise, so our steaks can stay juicier. There have been some vague ideas about using two lambs, but these have been rejected so far as too high costs for too little gain. We wouldn't be able to eat it either.

This steak, by the way, is more than just an after-product of the way we run things. Aside from lambs and ducklings being cheaper to feed than the average 'normal' server, it is also vital in keeping our staff happy. You see, some of our staff are not vegetarians or even pretend-vegetarians. No, some of us have the occasional feast at replacement time, when various greeneries supplement our healthy meal. Call it our reward for keeping this site running.

As you can imagine, daily maintenance is also far worse than people think. Rather than just having a computer sit quietly in a corner, a server must serve the various creatures with their preferred food while also replenishing other supplies. A difficult and time-consuming job, especially when you consider that the phobias of the various admins make it difficult to find volunteers and is always conducted with lots of grumpiness. When one fails to reply to your PM or such, or seems grumpy, please consider that we are human too, and not all of us are fond of ducks or other birds. We might not be in the right state of mind to talk to you. They bite :-(

Page written by Joeno.

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