The Murkworks

solarbird and I updated the version of Debian we’re running on our web server tonight (because that’s just how we roll on Christmas, yo). So all you out there who have web pages or blogs hosted on our site, please doublecheck them and make sure nothing looks broken!

Dara and I confirmed that Apache came back up okay, as well as MySQL and WordPress, so non-Wordpress pages and WordPress blogs alike do appear to be loading. However, we have NOT checked things in depth. So please be sure and go over your pages and let us know if anything looks broken!

We’re not quite done settling everything on the new net yet. But I can bring you this tasty evidence of our new bandwidth:

Meanwhile: for those of you who connect to the Murkmush via newmoon, you might find that you can’t get to the MUSH from that server. If so, you might try connecting to lodestone instead and running tinyfugue there. I encourage people to run tf on newmoon usually but we do have an install of it on lodestone as well.

solarbird reminds me that the 209.20.199.10 address on newmoon has in fact been turned off, since unlike lodestone and door, newmoon can’t handle two addresses at once. For web purposes, this is really only of interest to those of you for whom we’re supporting mail on domains as well as web. If we’re supporting mail for you, your web hits go by default to newmoon, and I have to punt them over to lodestone instead. But since newmoon can’t talk to the old address any more, this means newmoon will just lose any hits sent to domains that still map to it.

Long story short, just keep doublechecking if your domains have caught up with the new IP addresses yet. Let me know if you have any questions!

For those of you keeping track, DNS changes have as of this afternoon still not fully made it out into the wild. I’m seeing several of our domains at half-propped status, with both versions (with and without www) not agreeing on whether they’re pointing at the old addresses or the new ones.

I cannot currently tell if this is an Apache problem, because the old addresses are not answering connections at all–if I try to throw my web browser directly at 209.20.199.10 or 209.20.199.11, the connection times out and never actually makes it to the servers. So there’s nothing in the Apache logs for me to debug. Note that the exact same servers are happily accepting web connections sent to the new addresses, though.

So, if you have web content with us on the Murk and you still can’t get to it, have patience and keep checking. Your domain probably isn’t fully propped yet. If you want to doublecheck whether it has or not, and you don’t know how to do that, here’s how:

• Windows computers: Open a command prompt and type ‘nslookup’, then a space, then your domain. For example, ‘nslookup annathepiper.org’.
• Mac computers or Linux: Open a command prompt and do the same thing as with a Windows computer, only using the ‘host’ command instead of ‘nslookup’. For example, ‘host annathepiper.org’.

If you get back an address that starts with 209, that’s the old address. One that starts with 173 is the new one.

Questions, let me know! And thanks for your patience, Murknet peeps!

I just got the confirmation from Comcast: we will be having SHINY! NEW! INTERNET! installed this coming Thursday between 8am and 12pm. solarbird will be working with the tech to get everything up and running.

This means that any of you folks out there who have or use resources on our net may notice weirdness in our web pages or mailing lists or server accessibility over the next couple of weeks as things get updated, and as the changes propagate out onto the net at large. So please have patience! And once everything settles, you should hopefully even notice much better speed for loading web pages and the like.

If you have files on our servers, either newmoon or lodestone, now would be a very good time to doublecheck that you have backups. Make sure in particular that you have off-site copies of anything critical. If you need help getting to any of your files, let me know!

Hi all,

Dara and I wanted to communicate with everybody that in the last many months we have been highly, HIGHLY dissatisfied with the state of our Internet service at the Murkworks. The quality of service we’ve had has been extremely erratic; our bandwidth has been very unstable, and far too often we’ve been actively down. This cannot continue.

But in order to make informed decisions about what course of action to pursue to improve matters, we need to hear about who’s using the Murkworks resources regularly, and in what fashion. So if you’re doing anything regularly on our servers, please let us know.

This includes but is not limited to:

• Hosting personal or professional web pages, whether for yourself or an organization
• A regularly maintained email account
• An active mailing list
• Primary or secondary DNS for domains
• Using account space for a backup of personal files

So please check in, folks. It’s important for us to get a real sense of who’s actively using the system. Thanks!