Tag: murknet

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Survey of Murkworks.net usage

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!

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Newmoon damaged by power spike, murkworks mail down

We just had a couple of power spikes at the Murk, like we do. This time though they appear to have taken out one of our UPSes–and it was the one that newmoon, our mail server, was plugged into. When I tried to bring newmoon back up, it worked for a while and then hung. I am not currently able to log into the system to restart its services.

So this means that as of this afternoon, mail services on murkworks.net are down. This impacts not only personal accounts but the various mailing lists we run. Please spread the word if you’re on any of our mailing lists, and if you have backup personal email accounts, let people know they should use them this weekend if they need to get in touch with you.

userinfosolarbird or I will post here when we have more updates. Watch here, either of our journals, or my Twitter or Facebook accounts.

Sorry about this, folks. :/

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Yet another power outage

But at least this one was short.

Woke up around 5:30, and failed to get back to sleep in the Comfy Blankets of Comfiness, so around 6:30 I thought “screw it” and got up with the intention of having a nice leisurely breakfast and then heading out for work. So there I was boiling water for tea and opening up the laptop to start my morning perusal of the Intarwebz, when suddenly–PANG! NO POWER!

Couple of nervous-making flickers, too. So I went to shut down the server core, and while userinfospazzkat came up to feed the cats and turn on a lantern to light the kitchen, I went up to wake up userinfosolarbird and let her know the power was out. A call to Puget Sound Energy told us only that “equipment failure” was the cause of the outage, and that it had apparently impacted 1,165 customers. YAY!

So I headed on into work a little early, getting market berries on the way for breakfast nomming, and shortly after I got to work Dara jumped on IM to let me know that we were back. And that I’d accidentally shut the servers down for reboot, not shutdown. Oops. *^_^*;;

Anyway folks, those of you with murkworks.net-hosted resources, please to be doublechecking them and make sure that they’re functioning correctly. We should be fine, but never hurts to doublecheck. And oh yes, for those of you who log onto it, the MurkMUSH is up!

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All Murkworks.net services are now online

The power came back on not long before it was time for me to get up anyway–which was long enough of a delay that I got to fail to go back to proper sleep for about three and a half hours, yay! Kept dozing and dreaming that the power was back on NO WAIT NO IT ISN’T no wait do I hear power trucks outside AUGH zzzzzzz.

Set the alarm on my iPhone to go off at my usual get up time, only to discover that my bedside clock had gotten fast by 20 minutes, so it actually woke me up first. Stumbled awake to get ready for work, resurrect the servers, and reset the blinking clocks.

Still don’t know what exactly happened; Puget Sound Energy’s automated message said they were on top of things and damage crews had been dispatched when I called around 3am. No notice on their web site though about what might have happened. I’ll have to see if I can find some news or something.

Anyway, newmoon, lodestone, and door are alive again, so all Murkworks.net services should be functional. Anybody with mailing list subscriptions or web pages or DNS or whatever on our site, if you see any issues, let me know!

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The Murknet is back

Awesome, turned out that the power came back online shortly after userinfospazzkat, userinfosolarbird, and I set out to attend a nice little afternoon barbecue over at userinfosksouth‘s place!

Paul and I are home from that now and I’ve brought the servers back online, so things should be returning to normal on the Murk. For the time being our net’s even behaving, though we’ll be keeping an eye out on that too. We now return you to your regularly scheduled geekery, already in progress.

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Heat wave in Seattle may take down the Murk

As many of y’all know we’re heading into what’s getting called a probable record-breaking heat wave here in the greater Seattle area. Which does, in a word, suck.

It sucks extra given that the Murk does not have full-house AC. While we do have a nice little portable unit we can park in the media room, and which will therefore keep userinfosolarbird, userinforisu, userinfospazzkat, and myself from melting into shapeless puddles, our server closet isn’t so lucky. It’s gotten pretty hot in there today and the heat wave is only just getting started.

So Dara fears she may have to conduct controlled shutdowns of our servers during the hottest parts of the day so as to prevent the boxes from overheating and frying themselves. Should this happen, mail and web services hosted by the Murk will unfortunately be affected. So if you’re wondering where any of the blogs we host went, or why our mailing lists aren’t relaying mail, or why the MurkMUSH went down, this’ll be why.

We’ll try to get notice out as we can, but that notice may by necessity be short. Keep an eye on userinfomurknet for any updates as they happen. And if you need to get in touch with me for any reason this week, it’ll probably be better to do so at my gmail address.

Thanks all, and those of you in the PNW, stay cool!