Ghan - Server Admin

[The Helper]

Ghan - Server Admin

I first noticed Ghan when he had thousands of posts and huge reputation. He was totally under my radar. It got to the point though I noticed him and he was heavy into helping on the site and heavy into wanting to know servers. Ace was our server admin at the time. A job he initially did not want but was ultimately the only for the job. We were really busy back then during the World Editor days. After the Great Crash Ace stepped up.

I am not one for having all my eggs in one basket so I backed Ghan and give him access to the site along with Ace. Ghan was already a forum Administrator at the time so the only way up was site Admin. Then Ace left. Ghan jumped in and took over. It was not easy as Ace had the place tightened up to his advanced knowledge and Ghan's learning intensified.

Ghan was already an Administrator at the Hive and they ran the same forum software that we did. I think that he did not have the kind of actual server access he wanted as the site was hosted at its owners house on some super awesome cable connection.

When Ace left Ghan had full control of all things server

To be continued....

What is Ghan doing now all these years later?

I make a living managing servers now, partly thanks to experience I got here starting some years ago. My official title is "Infrastructure Server Engineer"

I am still hoping that Ghan will write something about his History so I can add to this...

I want to specially Thank You Ghan, very much for all the work you have done as Admin and Network Architect of TH.net! You are the Man!

 

[iPeez]

I love reading these! Even tho I haven't been around all that long, it gives me insight on important people to the site that helped me out, and many others. I only saw their avatars and posts, never really knew what they were doing as administrators!

 

[FireCat]

I am still hoping that Ghan will write something about his History so I can add to this...

Hmm, we should lock him up here! Maybe, then he'll do it!?

 

[ArmedCitizen]

Ghan is the man with the plan and strong back hand. And he has never given up on Legolas.

 

[Ghan]

I can write some history about me. It's on my list.

 

[rover2341]

Id like to hear a little more what that entails in detail. but pretty interesting non the less.

 

[Ghan]

I joined The Helper in January of 2007. That may sound like a long time ago, but I was (and still am) something of a newbie on the site. TH itself has been around since pre-2000, so it's not like I was one of the first around.
I, like many others before and after me, found the site through the always-popular World Editor Tutorials site (http://world-editor-tutorials.thehelper.net). I was interested in learning how to make maps for Warcraft 3, and this was the #1 place with the tutorials on how to do virtually anything related with the editor. I wasn't very active immediately after I joined - for the first few months I didn't do much of anything with the site. But that all change in the summer of that year. Out of school for the year, I didn't have anything better to do but sit around and play with the Warcraft 3 editor. This also meant I spent a lot of time on the site. I'm a terrible map maker. I don't have any eye for graphics and design, and I never came up with any kind of a storyline to accompany a good map. My main interest in the process was how to accomplish certain things in the editor and finding out how cool stuff worked. It was really my first exposure to computer programming of any kind, and TH was a good place to both learn more and help out others who were just starting out as well.

It was during this same summer that I started to branch out on the site as well. There were actually other forums aside from the World Editor Help Zone
TH may say that I came out of nowhere, but I was heavily active in the WET forum, which was at the time easily the busiest forum on the site. TH may have come by from time to time to see what was going on in there, like he did with all the forums, but I probably just did not show up on the radar with all the other activity that was happening. I may not have been the main event in the forum, but I was a big contributor during that summer of 2007 from June - August. There were days there where I would post 100 times in a single 24-hour period. Obviously not long posts like this, but all of them (hopefully) in some way constructive trying to help out people with the Warcraft 3 editor. But I also ended up getting involved with the news section as well. I noticed that TH liked to post current news stories, so I tried to help out there as well by posting interesting news stories. At the time, TH didn't have much else than himself, so I think that helped him develop that section a bit more than he was able on his own.
During that time, I may have been somewhat over-zealous in my use of the "Report Post" button. Nevertheless, whether it was because I was just really active and helping out or because the existing staff got tired of seeing me report things, I got promoted to Super Mod in July of the same year. http://www.thehelper.net/threads/new-moderators.54118/

Once classes started back up in the fall of that year, I was less active, but still around a fair bit. I was always intensely interested in computers and I became more interested in how the software (vBulletin at the time) worked. Later that year, TH told me about the Nuon-Dome forums. There's actually a separate site for Nuon-Dome: http://nuon-dome.com/ (Also hosted on the same server and run by TH)
TH wanted the forums here to match the site design on the stand-alone site. Well, though I'm not a designer, I already had the design built and just had to copy it to the forum system. So I did that around September of 2007. It's not a complete snapshot, but this is kind of what that subforum looked like: http://web.archive.org/web/20101206170306/http://www.thehelper.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=105
Basically just took the graphics from the site, put them on the forum and changed a few colors. Well, that's what got me promoted to Administrator on the site. After that, I continued to help out where I could and learn more about how the server worked. At the time, the server was run by AceHart and was hosted at Softlayer. TH can probably tell you more about TH's server history before that point. Well, as you may have read in other posts, AceHart left in 2009. April 23rd, to be exact. He left the server credentials to TH, but TH didn't really have the time or the desire to manage the server, so it was actually phyrex1an and I who got in and started figuring out how it was set up. (Shoutout to phyrex! How are things going? It has been ages. )
So we slowly got a handle on the server and at least kept it running for a while. We've moved servers several times since then, mostly due to price (servers can be expensive) and performance issues. That could be a whole thread in and of itself. I know for a fact that TH.net single-handedly caused some shouting and heated tempers in the offices of a certain server hosting company. lol
I've been much less active lately, but I've kept the server going and I do make an effort to check the site at least once a day when possible. I also pushed to get the site moved to xenForo a while back. That was a big undertaking. We lost some features and gained others. Overall, I think it was for the best. Even the new version 5 of vBulletin just seems to be poorly done and somewhat cumbersome.


Anyway, that's a bit about me. Hope I wasn't too boring here. Have a good one, and I'll see you around TheHelper.net!

Best,
Ghan

 

[The Helper]

Bumping for great Justice and btw... Ghan is still the Man!

 

[Ghan]

Next month will mark 15 years on TH.net