TELUS RESPONSIBLE FOR SITE DOWNTIME JULY 14th and 15th!

[stem]

Hey everybody! Sorry if you tried to access anything on the site on July 14 and 15th. Our wonderful friends at Telus decided that I needed a new static IP address for my server but didn't bother to mention that to me. I was "migrated" so they say. The result was that because I was unaware of the change I only discovered it Monday morning when I couldn't get an internet connection to anything.

We had the connection re-established by the early afternoon but then all the DNS records had to be changed and that took another 24 hours or more.

For those who enjoy the technicalities, usually if you know that your IP is going to change and you have control of your DNS records like I do for most of my domains, you reduce the TTL down to a very low value like 60 so when the change occurs you can get your address propagated through the internet in a very short time. But because I was caught by surprise and usually run a TTL of 42200 on the sites I control the DNS on, that mean at least 12 hours before anything will change. For this domain however, it's with a different registrar who doesn't let me control the TTL and I suspect the TTL is more like 82400 or even higher meaning the change wouldn't be seen for at least 24 hours.

Anyways, welcome to my world of ISP problems from time to time and sorry about that. Hope no one thought we disappeared for good!

[stem]

In a continuing comedy of errors, now the registrar and holder of the DNS records (Budgetnames.ca) for DARDPI.CA has failed to update the IP change I submitted on Monday. Here it is Wednesday; their management page for this domain has the new correct IP (submitted Monday afternoon) and yet the old IP is still on their DNS servers. I have repeatedly sent them reports from the "dig" program and only this morning did I receive an email indicating that they would finally take a look at this.

Such is the frustration of running a website sometimes. My apologies.

[Chuck Conway]

Hi Steve,

I for one am glad you are handling it. If it was on my shoulders, the delays would have been MUCH longer. Thanks for managing this excellent resource.

Chuck Conway

[stem]

It's finally up. What a process! I guess that's why I do this myself on my own server. I learned early on that keeping your web sites on provider's sites can be a disaster (whoops! We upgraded you! - zap). So I decided to run my own server and learn. This is about the 5th year now and I love it because I know what's going on with it. Sometimes I hate it because it costs me a day unexpectedly from time to time when I definitely had other plans!

This server is an IBM Netvista 8311-KUA on Server 2003. It's a single core 3 Gig Pentium processor with 512 MB of memory and 2 mirrored 120 GB drives. It connects to the world through Telus on an ADSL server package 2.5 GB download and 1.5 GB upload. The web server is IIS6 and the mail server is Merak Mail Server 8.5. Additional software installed to run web sites like a wiki and a forum are MySQL and PHP. And that's about it. Oh yea.. back-ups are 3 times a week for the web sites.

I used to run this server on a normal residential service. My original contract and network from way back when didn't have any restrictions. Then last year they "migrated" me to a new network - new contract and guess what??; NO servers allowed unless you pay for the server package. So my bill jumped from $28/mo to $80/mo with no increase in service or speed; just the ability to continue what I had been doing all along. What a bunch of bandits.

EMail was just as bad. Providers don't care how much junk mail gets into your mail box. They don't have time to deal with it and you can't control it except to try and filter it out as you are receiving it. I like Merak because it is easy to configure, easy to see everything that's going on and has great Spam control. I use the Greylisting as my primary weapon followed by RBLs at Spamcop and Spamhaus. Result: maybe 10 junk mail a week. Most often less than that. Last week 6, week before 5, week before that 3 and last month's total only 14 in my mailbox.

So this is one of my distractions that I actually enjoy mostly as well. Computers. It's my pleasure to combine two of my favourite distractions together!

[downeastrailfan]

Glad to see the site is back up. Your doing a great job, Steve.