Site Flakiness

I have been mucking around (in a good way) with the site a lot lately. In the process, I managed to do some Jean Claude Van Damage to the general workingness of this site. Here come the excuses. First off, I've been experiencing some strange issues with piggy the last few days, and narrowed the cause down to an out-of-date kernel. When I went from a PII-300/128MB to a Celeron 1.8Ghz/256MB, I needed to fix piggy's kernel up to properly support the hardware it was running on. I had to do a lot of emergency work on the old 2.4.20 kernel to get it booting/working on the new hardware (it was losing interrupts, and did other bad things). That was a band-aid, and it was time for me to finally get the system where it belongs. Enter the 2.6.8 kernel I compiled and installed for piggy last night. So far, so good. Another thing that I'm doing for the site is related to improving the usefulness for my customers. I'm slightly ahead of myself here, but it's all for a good reason. I want to release the product with as much of a support system as possible for the people that buy my product(s). Enter the "public" bug system. Using the mantis bug tracker, I have set up a site at bugs.supermegaultragroovy.com which is accessible only to registered users of my software. The benefits are clear to registered users, since they are able to report issues, view known issues (to check status, and make sure I'm working on it), and request features. I particularly like the Mantis system for its ease of use when entering an issue, and the simplicity of setting up and maintaining the system. When compared with Bugzilla, I much prefer allowing public access to this system, since Bugzilla makes it far too difficult to enter bugs, and its visual design leaves much to be desired.