Tag Archive for ‘hosting’ at T. Longren

Tag Archive for 'hosting'

More Dreamhost Network Issues

Published

on October 1, 2006

. 0 Comments

Dreamhost is recovering from yet another network outage. Apparently a switch had issues and they had to take a few servers off that switch. Supposedly the servers were moved over to another temporary switch so they’d have network access, but I haven’t had access to longren.org for at least 2 hours now.

We have moved the servers in the affected rack to knew switches in other racks temporarily while we get a new switch in place. We are working on recovery efforts now on servers which may be down. The list of affected servers is:

Arrow, mel, caesar, herod, alondra, overland, rossmore, oxnards, cerritos, selma, nala, demeter, jarvis. This is a mix of 3 MySQL servers and the rest webservers.

Longren.org is hosted on oxnard unfortunately, that box seems to have a lot of issues, even when the Dreamhost network is functioning properly. They’ve now managed to replace the problematic switch and are working on bringing servers back online.

Sorry about no timestamp before, it’s 12:36 Pacific time (-0800? I never could keep track of daylight savings time.)

We have completely replaced the switch and are working on getting the servers back online. All networking cables are back in their regularly scheduled switch ports.

I always get a kick out of the angry comments that show up on the Dreamhost Status blog whenever a fairly widespread problem occurs. Of course, Dreamhost hasn’t had great reliability in the last few months. I feel bad for those trying to run a business with Dreamhost.

One quick note, WordPress 2.0.5 should be here soon.

UPDATE: Apparently there’s still trouble. Now Dreamhost is saying the servers affected are still behaving abnormally. This box, oxnard, doesn’t appear to be affected though, for once! They’re still updating that same post at the Dreamhost Status blog:

Wierdness is afoot. The servers are still exhibiting the same problems, we have even moved two of them into our new datacenter and it’s the same deal. It’s only specific servers in half of one of our racks.

UPDATE 2 @ 8:52 PM CST: Dreamhost now says all their problems are over. Which they do appear to be. I believe the K2 site is hosted at Dreamhost, I noticed it was down for a while but has since been revived. Here’s the update from the Dreamhost Status blog:

As of 1700 Pacific time (GMT-0800 or so, 5PM), we think the issues with this rack are behind us. We moved some machines to new hardware and this seems to have fixed the problems. We will be looking in to this more on monday, and doing some extensive testing on that hardware to make sure it was the root cause of the problem.

Hopefully this was just a minor fluke and we don’t see any more problems. Like I said before, Dreamhost has been less than stable these last couple months. Honestly though, I have noticed this site loads much quicker since Dreamhost fought with their network last time. Still, there’s a lot of recent posts categorized as “system outages” at the Dreamhost Status blog.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Wordpress.com: Domain Mapping

Published

Tyler

on July 31, 2006

in Internet, Personal and WordPress

. 1 Comment

Wordpress.com, the free blog hosting site based off Wordpress, is getting ready to allow users to use their own domain names in conjunction with the wordpress.com service. What’s that mean? You will be able to setup a domain to point to your wordpress.com blog.

For example, I blog at http://slackware.wordpress.com. If I bought the slackwareblog.com domain, I could point it to slackware.wordpress.com. So, slackwareblog.com would essentially be running on top of Wordpress.com. It’s a lot like gmail for your domain.

Right now, Wordpress.com is only testing this feature out, offering it to the first 8 people to comment on the Wordpress.com blog post discussing the new feature. I’ve been wishing for this feature since I started using wordpress.com, glad it’s finally on the horizon.

On a related note, “92.63% of the traffic to WordPress.com is for blogs outside of the top 25.” I figured it’d be lower than that, but that’s pretty impressive for those outside the top 25.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Dreamhost Issues

Published

Tyler

on July 17, 2006

in Dreamhost, Internet and Personal

. 1 Comment

This site hasn’t been accessible for a while this morning. Dreamhost appears to be having some issues with a fileserver that keeps crashing. All seems to be good now, but it sounds like they’ve been through this before. The got the box up once and thought it was stable, until it crashed again a short time later:

Once we got the machine up, fixed and serving files, everything seemed like it was ok, so we went back to making sure all content, data and websites were working normally.

Right about then, it crashed again! This time, however, it came back up correctly, so it didn’t take as long as it had previously.

See the Dreamhost Status Blog and the Unofficial Dreamhost Blog for details. Hopefully this is the end of the issues for now, but who knows.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Gmail For Your Domain

Published

Tyler

on March 28, 2006

in Dreamhost, Internet and Personal

. 4 Comments

Hosted Gmail, or “Gmail for your domain”, is sweet. It provides the ability to use the Gmail interface with your domains email. So, I go to my hosted Gmail and I can send/receive email at the longren.org domain.

I had to change my MX records at DreamHost over to Google’s, naturally. I didn’t include a priority when switching them over though, stupid. I guess I was expecting a seperate form field for those. Didn’t cause much of a delay though.

I really like the idea of “Gmail for your domain.” It serves it’s purpose very well. I could go for a few more features in the administration area. The “Advanced Tools” in the picture is really a “tool” for editing your accounts in bulk. Under “Domain Settings” you’ll have the opportunity to set a custom logo, edit the sign-in page, and enable/disable chat. The only thing you can currently edit on the sign-in page is the color of the username/password boxes. Click for a bigger picture.

I expect a whole slew of new customizable settings as the beta progresses. I believe the chat feature was just added today, although standard Gmail has had that for some time now. I’d really like to be able to edit the title used on pages. It seems to just use the domain as the title right now.

I noticed they’ve got an “Account Plan” indicator on the administration dashboard. Google will probably start charging for this service once it’s out of beta, which could be in like 15 years. I mean, Gmail itself is still in beta. They might even charge per user, I’ve got “Up to 200 users for free.” I’d actually expect a pricing schema very similar to that seen today in web hosting. But probably cheaper.

Hopefully that screenshot isn’t against the TOS or anything. I’m not gonna bother reading that 50 page psycho-babble though. Maybe I’ll post more screenshots later.

On a somewhat related note, Garett Rogers (at ZDNet blogs) is speculating about “Google Music“. It’s not news though, just hardcore speculation.

Information gathered at the Digital Hollywood pre-show suggests Google is holding an invitation only event for twenty top music industry executives this Thursday. This may suggest that Google is moving forward plans to compete with Apple and others in the downloadable music space.

The topic of this meeting isn’t known, but we can speculate that Google may be showing an early stage product that is in the making or trying to form partnerships like they have with CBS.

UPDATE: Science Addiction has a nice review of Gmail for your domain, along with screenshots. Site may be slow as it got slashdotted earlier today, seems to be recovering now.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Hello DreamHost

Published

Tyler

on March 21, 2006

in Dreamhost, Internet and Personal

. 0 Comments

You probably didn’t even notice, but this site is now being hosted at DreamHost. My main purpose for moving is stability. My server at home hasn’t been acting too well lately. When it gets too warm it’ll simply freeze up and will take 20 minutes to come back on. I’m pretty sure it’s a power supply issue. Simple to fix once I find the time to get another PSU.

Anyway, I transferred the domain registration and everything here to DreamHost. I got a wicked good deal. I paid one year in full already and got an 83% discount using the “DHM” dreamhost promo code. Original bill was $119.40, all I had to pay was $29.40.

I really enjoy DreamHost so far. I was able to replicate this whole site here on DreamHost except for the System Status page. It’s a great relief to have this site out of my house. I no longer wish to blatantly ignore the TOS provided by my ISP.

Please, if you notice any problems, get in touch with me.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Wordpress.com Invite

Published

Tyler

on October 10, 2005

in Internet and Personal

. 7 Comments

I recieved my wordpress.com invitation on Saturday morning. Wordpress.com is a hosted wordpress blog setup. I signed up to be invited right when I heard about it a few months ago. Since I don’t really need or want another blog, I’m gonna give the invite away…if anybody is interested. Comment or send an email if you want it.

If I did need a blog, I’d probaby choose to host it with wordpress.com just because it uses WordPress and it’s free. Might wanna see what Basil’s got goin on for breakfast this morning.

Linked @ The Political Teen, Outside The Beltway, and Mudville Gazette.

Popularity: 3% [?]