Heads up folks who are on mailing lists hosted on murkworks.net or who get their personal mail there: we are having an unexpected outage of newmoon, the server that runs our mail. We’re working on it.
The outage is going to necessitate a clean install of the operating system, and once that’s done we’ll have to reinstate functionality like mailing lists. We apologize for the inconvenience!
Primarily impacted by this:
1) the lexfa.org and filk mailing lists;
2) anybody who gets personal mail on newmoon.
I’ll post here, on Twitter, and on my Facebook page when newmoon is back up. Thanks in advance for your patience! Drop a comment if you have any questions.
(Those of you who follow me on Facebook already saw me posting about this, but this is for everybody who missed the story!)
Thursday morning, around 4am, I got woken up of a sound sleep to discover that the power had gone out. How my sleeping mind knew this: the air filter had gone off.
I need the soft noise of the air filter to sleep–I have a very hard time sleeping in total silence. So when the filter went out and the room was in fact silent, that was enough to wake me up.
Noting out of the gate: the entire Murkworks household is well. Dara, Paul, and I, along with George, are staying at home as much as we possibly can. We were doing so even before Governor Inslee issued the stay-at-home order for Washington state–and really, at least for Dara and Paul, being at home all day isn’t much different from pre-COVID-19 days. Dara’s “day job” is to be the landlady for our rental house, and Paul’s been working from home for months now, ever since his employer shut down their Seattle office.
I’d posted last month on my angelahighland.info site about how our webserver, the very server where annathepiper.org is hosted, kept crashing.
Good news! I’m pleased to report that for the time being, anyway, we’ve found a solution. I also put that post on angelahighland.info instead of here, just because that’s where the first post was. But if you’re interested, you can find the details right over here.
Most of you out there probably are aware already, but just in case you aren’t, be advised that we have serious snow on the way here. Therefore, as is often the case when we have wacky fun weathertimes, connectivity to Murkworks.net and resources we house may be impacted. Our power may go out, or even if we stay up, connectivity via Comcast may be affected if there are any issues with ice on power or phone lines.
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 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!
Most of y’all will probably have already seen me flailing around Facebook and G+ about this, but for those who haven’t: we’ve got hornets at the Murkworks! YAY!
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!
Hey, Seattle-based peeps! My belovedest , in her auspices of Crime and the Forces of Evil, will be doing her very first bar-type show at the Cafe Venus/Mars Bar tomorrow night! She will be playing along with Natalie Quist and Gimmie a Pigfoot, and I’ll be there to provide merch support.
(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!
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!
