Category: Web

Web technology

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Web

Weblogging for poets-series published

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I just published the final three parts of the Weblog Link Series, on permalinking and archives:

Part 1 – The Impermanence of Permalinks

Part 2 – Re-weaving the Broken Web

Part 3 – Architectural Changes for Friendly Permalinking

Part 4 – Sweeping out the webs

Categories
Web

One of those days?

Have you ever had one of those days?

One of those days when you’re faced with trying to get a whole bunch of moving parts working together such as on a web server, and there’s a hundred million possible combinations of Things you Can Do, but only one works?

And have you had one of those days when all combinations of Things don’t seem to work and you find yourself getting really angry at, in order:

  • The ISP
  • The creators of each of the technologies
  • Tim Berners-Lee for starting all of this
  • Edison for inventing electricity
  • Galileo for insisting the world revolves around the sun, thus opening the door to science, leading to an increased interest in technology
  • Your parents for having you
  • President Bush, because you’re always angry at President Bush

Have you ever had one of those days when you realize that the solution is doing this little tweak here, and that tiny one there, all nicely documented in the installation and configuration instructions – which you decided NOT to read, and which would have only taken about an hour and you’ve spent probably three days doing it the hard way?

Have you had one of those days when you realize this and you spend the next hour BASHING YOUR HEAD AGAINST THE WALL for being so stupid?

I’m not saying I’ve had one of those days. Just asking if you have had one of those days.

Excuse me, but I have a headache. I’m going to bed now. No, no! I know the way. Thank you.

Categories
Technology Web

Even servers take vacations

I was able to add SMTP authentication to my installed mail system, which means people will have to log in to send email as well as receive it. This should thwart the misbegotten sons of diseased camels that are spammers.

I found that the Wayward Weblogger co-op isn’t the only server that had some technical difficulties yesterday. When I went to visit Dare Obasanjo’s weblog, I found this wonderful system message:

K5 is on vacation for the day

Yesterday those of you who were around might recall seeing the site down or really slow for a good chunk of the day. There were some database problems, then a really bizarre thing with the Scoop servers which was solved by rebooting them, but after the reboot one came back up without sshd running so I can’t get in to configure it, and then some kind person decided to DoS us mildly. Oh, and I upgraded the database somewhere in there too.

So we’re on one Scoop server at the moment, and the database really needs to be archived more. I wrote a script to do archiving a lot faster, but it needs to run for a while, and it’s 4AM here and what with everything else I think I’m just calling today a maintenance day so I can go to bed.

It’s summer, and I’m sure many of you have things you’ve been meaning to get to. So now’s the time. Enjoy your K5 vacation day, and we’ll see you bright and early on Wednesday.

–rusty

This is about the best description of a server problem – no holding back the details – followed by the best philosophy to take in these situations:

Here’s the problem. Here’s what we’re doing. In the meantime – I have a life, you have a life, these things happen, and don’t you have something fun to do, instead?

This just became the official policy at the Wayward Weblogger co-op.

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Burningbird Technology Web

Not the best welcome home

Managed to make it from San Francisco to St. Louis in two days, but I’m tired, Very tired. I have photos and stories, but unfortunately, I came home and found that the co-op server was hit. The open Sendmail door, unfortunately, but from the nature of what I’m seeing, it looks like the hit to our server was part of the hacker contest today.

If you’ve sent email to me in the last few days, hold until the all clear and then please re-send. If you need to talk to me, please put message in comments for now, until I get this fixed.

I’ve shut down email in the meantime until we have something else working.

Update From a comment left, it would seem that the hackers are also hacking the Movable Type comments.

Second Update Okay, have deleted all the outgoing emails in the queue – take that spam/hackers. And then I’ve assigned all incoming emails to postmaster to /dev/null, which basically discards them. I had 15,000 emails waiting me when I got home. I knew I wasn’t that popular.

Finally, I turned off relaying, which means people will get incoming email, including me, but no one can send using the co-op server. If you’ve sent me email, I’d appreciate it if you would resend. Tomorrow, if I can finally get some sleep, I’ll look at a replacement for Sendmail.

F**cking Hackers.

Categories
Technology Web

Switchover

My DNS change to the new server switched over in mid-post, and that created some interesting results. I’m still recovering from them. Note to self: take a break from weblogging next time you switch servers.

Once this all stabilizes I’ll move any outstanding comments and trackbacks from the old server to the new one so they aren’t lost.

I’m also waiting for wildcard DNS to propagate for burningbird.net so that I can turn on the co-op weblogs. I originally looked for them before the propagation made it all the way through and now I have to wait for the cache on my ISP DNS to expire before I’ll be able to access them. You can access, I can’t.

I screwed up the yasd.com zone file by forgetting the period at the end of one of the name server names, resulting in:

ns1.burningbird.net.yasd.com

Since it was the secondary name server, things seem to be working out.

Kaf wrote in the comments (which I have to move over, unless they’re here already, but where’s here?) – this week is the 20 year anniversary of DNS. It was purely a coincidence that I wrote the Internet for Poets essay.

Question on this essay: did you find the writing fit the general concept of “Internet for Poet”? Was it helpful? Interesting? Should I do more of the same?