Assume therefore that if you can’t reach any commonly accessed Murkworks.net resources, this will be why. This will include the Murkworks MUSH, WordPress sites and other web pages, mailing lists, user logins, and mail.

Follow Cliff Mass’ blog for ongoing weather developments if you’re interested. His last two posts on the situation are here and here. The Times has an article up here.

If we do go down and you need to reach me, you can do so via my gmail addresses, annathepiper or angela.korrati.

solarbird

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!

solarbird reported after we got back from Canada that she found the cats playing with a MOTHRA-SIZED hornet that they’d caught in the kitchen–and that after that, she’d realized that a few days before, the cats had been realizing something was going on, because George had kept looking at her with this “Hey, do you hear that?” look on his kitty face, and then staring up at the walls.

Once the cats caught the hornet, though, that pretty much necessitated calling in a professional. Who showed up yesterday and informed Dara that we had the worst nest he’d seen all year, with approximately 600-800 hornets in it. This, I can assure you all, is NOT an area in which I want our household to excel. He wound up hitting the nest with two different extermination products, and didn’t even take a check from Dara because he intended to come back (tomorrow, as I write this) to follow up and make sure the job’s actually completed.

Since his visit yesterday Dara and spazzkat have between them caught three different hornets getting into various parts of the house. So apparently there have been a few daughty little survivors fleeing the nuking of their hornet colony, and presumably if left unchecked they will band together on a tiny hornet Galactica in search of tiny hornet Earth. Except we’re going to go all Cylon on them. There are many copies and WE HAVE A PLAN.

Dara’s phobic about bees and wasps and hornets. I’m not, but you know what? 600-800 hornets is enough to make me cringe, too. That is entirely TOO MANY HORNETS, no matter how you slice it. Hopefully the exterminator will make sure we don’t have any other stragglers. We’ll see how tomorrow goes!

solarbird

(Yes, you heard that correctly, I will be in an actual bar on an actual Friday night. But with my belovedest performing, hey, it’s worth it!)

Music starts up at 9pm and there will be a $6 cover charge. There will also very likely be shenanigans, and definitely rage-driven acoustic elfmetal. You should all come listen, and furthermore, buy her album while you’re at it. And if you see me, say hi!

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!

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!

solarbird

And, Internets, I could use your help! We host the following domains. Please let me know if you can reach them both with and without www at the beginning of the URL:

• aerialscribe.com
• angelakorrati.com
• annathepiper.org
• baconforbirds.com
• crimeandtheforcesofevil.com
• enchantedquills.com
• lexfa.org
• mediababe.org
• miminoyes.com
• monsterhat.com
• murkworks.net
• pecktavern.com
• pmjohnsondesign.com
• solarbird.net
• unseeliecourt.net
• upcc.org
• uplakekenmore.org
• uplake.org

ALSO, and this is IMPORTANT:

If you own a domain hosted at our site, you should log into whatever registrar you’re using to make sure that your references to our name servers are up to date. Drop me a comment or send me email at my gmail address (annathepiper) to doublecheck what name servers you should be using!

solarbird

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!

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!