Airbana will be at the 2012 Airsoft Arms Fair on the 19th of May providing free WiFi all day and we’ll be giving away all the big A0 Map Posters of all the UK Skirmish sites at the end of the day.

About the Airsoft Arms Fair:

AAF is an event for Airsofters and people interested in the sport to view a wide range of products all in one place, afterall nothing beats being able to see the item for yourself. At the same time we offer the opportunity for sites and event organisers to tell you about what they have to offer.


Allowing you to book for a MilSim or FilmSim game and acquire everything your missing from your load out all at the same venue.


We also offer the opportunity for private sellers to retail their second user equipment, excess guns and rare and unusual kit. Make sure to check these guys out as theres bound to be some incredible bargains.

Earlier this month we released the newest version of the Airbana World Wide Airsoft Map on http://www.AirsoftMaps.com

Each Country has it’s own section to show only the Airsoft Retailers and Airsoft Skirmish sites in that geographic region.

The new website has only been live for a few days but over 200 new locations have been added to countries such as;

Czech Republic

South Africa

Canada

Belgium

Switzerland

France

Spain

Italy

Find your Country in the list of enabled locations here or if we don’t have any Airsoft locations listed yet enable your Country here and then get started with adding Airsoft Retailers and Skirmish sites!

I get a lot of feedback from Skirmishers, Site Operators, Retailers and colleagues about the Map and I keep a note of all the suggestions that these people make. Once people have pointed out an improvement or a bug I add it to the list;

This months improvements are;

• Changed default zoom level when viewing a site to a closer level
• Site boundaries are drawn by default when viewing an individual site
• Added a link back to the Map view of a site when viewing event details
• Changed the reviews calculation to take into account time since last review
• Added another CDN node to speed things up for people in other parts of Europe

If you have suggestions or any other type of feedback feel free to email me on Gareth@Airbana.net, send a Tweet to @Airbana or write on the Airbana Facebook page.

Some sites were added to the Airbana database before the more advanced geo-coding capabilities were in place and some sites are shown at their exact Post Code when in fact they may be some distance from that point.

To make things easier for Site Operators to show exactly where their site is the Airbana Airsoft Map allows you to change the GPS co-ordinates to within an accuracy of 1.11 cm using a very simple drag and drop interface.

See the video below for more details:

If you have any suggestions for features or improvements to the Airbana Airsoft Maps feel free to send me an email Gareth@Airbana.net, send a tweet to @Airbana or leave a message on the Airbana Facebook Page.

As some of you may know the Airbana Airsoft Map is a non-profit side project I operate in my spare time to help give back to the Airsoft community. My ‘day job’ is an operations engineer or Systems Administrator for a ‘big data’ platform. For anyone else interested in that sort of thing I thought it was time to post an update about how the infrastructure has grown since the 2008 Blog post.

Airbana has dedicated web sites for the US and the UK with a shared website for the entire  world (www.AirsoftMaps.com) which requires a chunk of infrastructure to ensure you get the best performance wherever you are.

Airbana uses Route53′s latency based routing to send you to the geographically closest caching server  for static content like CSS files, images etc and to the PHP processing servers.

Database servers are spread about the globe with Master Master replication between the primaries and Master Slave replication to the localised secondaries.

S3 storage handles backups, cached map tiles, pre-rendered minimaps and site photos (a new feature!)

Quick Stats

• 48x 2.6Ghz cores
• 80Gb RAM
• 2Tb local storage
• 250Gb S3 Storage
• 4 geographically distributed MySQL DB servers
• 8 geographically distributed caching servers (ELB EC2 instances running varnish)
• 4 geographically distributed Apache / PHP processing servers
• All servers are running CentOS 5 Linux with Apache, Varnish, PHP, MySQL, NGINX and HaProxy

The basic layout looks something like this;