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And the Saga Continues.... (21 comments)
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And the Saga Continues....

in Housekeeping by phillip

Thursday, April 29, 2004 - 09:12 AM

As Jon mentioned when announcing our "Huge Casebound Book Sale" <subliminal>buy now....</subliminal> we're in the process of moving the site to new machines entirely. I finally got fed up of having a wind tunnel of multiple server fans buzzing behind me as I work from home, and more importantly some contractual timelines are finally coming to an end.

I'm in the process of moving DNS, email, the database, and the site itself over to the new machines. Pretty much in that order. I'm trying to do it in a way I think makes sense and will minimize disruption and the amount of downtime. Undoubtedly I will fail, and the site will be unreachable at that time. In the meantime, rstevens has been kind enough to set us up with a temporary forum over at Dumbrella to which you can post descriptions of any of these disruptions as they happen. Hopefully that will allow me to get the site up and running again faster than I could otherwise.

UPDATE: Current plans are that at some point very early tomorrow (May 8) there will be mega-downtime as I move the database over to its new home. DNS records will be updated to reflect the new servers at approximately the same time. Assuming all goes well, next week I'm going to be auctioning off some of the old machines, so anyone interested in 1999-era hardware can look forward to owning a piece of Goats.

alethio
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Re: And the Saga Continues.... (Score: 1)
posted Thursday, April 29, 2004 - 05:51 PM (#16579)
Ahh, fake html. Always good shit.
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sakuruth
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Re: And the Saga Continues.... (Score: 2)
posted Thursday, April 29, 2004 - 06:54 PM (#16581)
In Response to alethio (#16579):

Ah, but can shit truly be good? Does excrement have the capacity for moral reasoning?

The answer, of course, is 'no'. Take a look at the LGs.

</pedant>

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zamphir
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Re: And the Saga Continues.... (Score: 3, Informative)
posted Thursday, April 29, 2004 - 07:06 PM (#16582)
In Response to sakuruth (#16581):

Not to mention, if he was trying to refer to UBBCode instead of HTML...

The Dumbrella forums actually support both, and support more HTML than can be used here.

So, really, what Phillip gives us to play with is the "faker" of the two HTMLs.

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themysticalone
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Re: And the Saga Continues.... (Score: 2)
posted Thursday, April 29, 2004 - 07:07 PM (#16583)
In Response to sakuruth (#16581):

I think my shit ascended to heaven once.
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Magus
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Re: And the Saga Continues.... (Score: 1)
posted Friday, April 30, 2004 - 08:38 AM (#16594)
In Response to themysticalone (#16583):

I think my shit ascended to heaven once.

*groan*

  That's the shittiest post I've read in a long time...

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mcgrue
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Re: And the Saga Continues.... (Score: 2)
posted Friday, April 30, 2004 - 12:54 PM (#16595)
In Response to sakuruth (#16581):

What if the poster was a sapient dung beetle?
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phillip
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Re: And the Saga Continues.... (Score: 2)
posted Sunday, May 02, 2004 - 11:28 AM (#16638)
and bringing the discussion back on track...

DNS is on the new machines, as is mail. Although the mail transition will be a little trickier as I try to make sure that nothing gets lost as the new IPs propagate. All outgoing mail should still be good, so it's just jon, myself, and those others with accounts on our machine that will have to suffer.

and tomorrow, the site starts its progress. Though nothing should break until later in the week.

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Dynedain
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Re: And the Saga Continues.... (Score: 2)
posted Monday, May 03, 2004 - 01:31 PM (#16660)
In Response to phillip (#16638):

new mail is trivial :P

add this line to the ~/etc/hosts.allow file on your old server

smtp submission aol : all : twist /bin /echo "450 This server is moving its IP address"

it will prevent the old server from receiving messages, then just copy over the mail files and cat them togethor
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zamphir
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Re: And the Saga Continues.... (Score: 2)
posted Monday, May 03, 2004 - 01:39 PM (#16661)
In Response to Dynedain (#16660):

are you sure about that relative path?
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Dynedain
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Re: And the Saga Continues.... (Score: 2)
posted Monday, May 03, 2004 - 01:45 PM (#16662)
In Response to zamphir (#16661):

well...thats what it is when you ssh in with what my provider gave (a virtual private server on a freeBSD setup).

and there shouldnt be that space in /bin/echo
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zamphir
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Re: And the Saga Continues.... (Score: 2)
posted Monday, May 03, 2004 - 02:02 PM (#16665)
In Response to Dynedain (#16662):

I suspect that Phillip isn't running on a virtual private server, and so he likely would want to actually change /etc/hosts.allow, rather than ~/etc/hosts.allow.

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Dynedain
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Re: And the Saga Continues.... (Score: 2)
posted Monday, May 03, 2004 - 03:42 PM (#16667)
In Response to zamphir (#16665):

yes, i realize that. but i'm guessing phillip knows enough to figure that much out ;)
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But do you ever see a person leave a cathedral toting a to-go box?

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phillip
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Re: And the Saga Continues.... (Score: 2)
posted Friday, May 07, 2004 - 02:52 PM (#16923)
In Response to Dynedain (#16667):

you'd be surprised how little I know.

After all, I hate being a sysadmin.

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zamphir
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Re: And the Saga Continues.... (Score: 2)
posted Friday, May 07, 2004 - 06:16 PM (#16932)
In Response to phillip (#16923):

After all, I hate being a sysadmin.

Umm.. I don't quite know how to tell you this, but...

ALL sysadmins hate being a sysadmin.

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phillip
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Re: And the Saga Continues.... (Score: 2)
posted Saturday, May 08, 2004 - 07:53 AM (#16956)
that went surprisingly smoothly, with only about two hours of downtime.

Ergo, something is broken. Let me know what you find.

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Rich
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Re: And the Saga Continues.... (Score: 2)
posted Tuesday, May 11, 2004 - 01:10 PM (#17006)
In Response to phillip (#16956):

Phillip,

I can't get Goats to open from home but I can at work. It was fine Friday but since then nothing.

I'll see if my firewall is doing something but I doubt it since all my links are fine. I'll keep you up to date either here or on Dumbrella.

I'm on Win98SE using IE 5.5 with Zone Alarm running.

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phillip
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Re: And the Saga Continues.... (Score: 2)
posted Tuesday, May 11, 2004 - 05:34 PM (#17012)
In Response to Rich (#17006):

Depending on what level of geek you are, email me and let me know what IP www.goats.com is resolving to, what results you're getting from a traceroute, etc.

I'm guessing your work name server is caching the old IP a little aggressively. When I dismantled the machines yesterday we were still getting a few hundred hits a day on them, so not everyone was paying attention to the 24 Hr TTL.

Hopefully this will clear up for you within a day or so.

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Rich
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Re: And the Saga Continues.... (Score: 2)
posted Wednesday, May 12, 2004 - 03:55 PM (#17049)
In Response to phillip (#17012):

Being an anti-geek, I got into a help chat with my ISP provider and told them that the goats.com IP (from geektools.com's whois) was 66.132.241.224. They had it as 66.132.241.223 which still didn't work. Ultimately, they gave me a Primary and Secondary DNS setting, I have no idea how I was connecting before, and voila, Goats is back.

I'll keep my fingers crossed for Thursday. If I have problems I'll email you.

Thanks.
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Rich
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Re: And the Saga Continues.... (Score: 2)
posted Thursday, May 13, 2004 - 11:22 AM (#17054)
In Response to Rich (#17049):

It's Thursday and things are working fine in the forums. Strip editing has some glitches in entering new locations/props/attributes though.

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phillip
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Re: And the Saga Continues.... (Score: 2)
posted Thursday, May 13, 2004 - 12:04 PM (#17055)
In Response to Rich (#17054):

It did have some glitches...I thought I fixed that when I got the error emails yesterday.

Assuming tomorrow's strip actually makes it live, let me know how adding that goes.

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Dynedain
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Re: And the Saga Continues.... (Score: 2)
posted Thursday, May 13, 2004 - 01:34 PM (#17060)
In Response to zamphir (#16932):

especially those of us that weren't hired to be sysadmins
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But do you ever see a person leave a cathedral toting a to-go box?

Coffins don't count.
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