We'll be performing server maintenance and upgrades over the next day or so.
Most of what we are doing will be transparent to you and and will not effect the live store site, but if you run into any anomalies on the store site (especially late this evening or overnight tonight), this is probably why.
We'll try to keep all the weird animal noises to a minimum while we're working... -_^
Just a quick FYI to everyone who had trouble getting on the store Saturday afternoon. And no, it was not network overload - I wish!
We use Yahoo's servers in Houston (with a backup in San Diego) to host the primary store site, and they experienced a pretty nasty DoS (denial of service) attack across their whole infrastructure today. Our store is one of the big ones and sits across a distributed network so I'm not exactly sure how long it was down for any one DNS, but it looks like the attack caused the RACS store to be at least intermittently down for about 3 hours between around 12:50 pm and 4:02 pm PST (that was around 3 to 6 PM here).
Anyway, their engineers at the NOC center in Houston did a great job and have now resolved the issue and we are back up and running.
Apologies to anyone who could not get on the store, or was trying to place on order during that short window on Saturday.
PS: And yes, it's 1:58am and yes I am just finishing up my day. Thanks for asking. :-)
UPDATE: Looks like the DoS attack that took down Yahoo's e-comm servers was related to Operation Payback. I wonder if these people actually know who they are hurting when they do this stuff.
I had always hoped that the BLURAY format would mostly eliminate the old region coding scheme, but it hasn't worked that way in all cases. There is Region Coding for BDs, but (unlike with DVD format) the use of region coding for BD disks is optional for content providers. I've read that something around 70% of available BD Discs from the major studios are Region Code FREE and can therefore be played anywhere.
Region coding for Anime BD's is even stranger, because North America shares the same region as Japan, so coding will not prevent re-imports which is always a major concern to the Japanese. Most current North American Anime BD releases are Region Free - except those from Funimation, and since we've recently gotten a few requests we have gone ahead and added BD Region Code info to the item pages for all of Funi's current BD releases.
So every one understands, BD Disk region coding divides the world into 3 regions:
A) Region A (that's us) includes most North, Central and South American and Southeast Asian countries plus Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong
B) Region B includes most European, African and southwest Asian countries plus Australia and New Zealand.
C) Region C contains the remaining central and south Asian countries, as well as China and Russia.
For your reference, here is a complete list of all Funi's current BD releases along with region coding information:
Just and FYI folks.
