I couldn't check goats for a few days last week (about Wednesday-Saturday), and when I did check it all I got was a listing of Apache files. Then today, my browser couldn't even find the server.

So I posted on another comic's forum asking if anyone knew what was up, and of course the site makes a fool out of me by coming back up instantly.

If there ever were any problems, are they all happy now, or might the site be up and down for a bit longer?

Weird DNS troubles, I think. For some reason, www.goats.com was resolving to the IP address for new2.goats.com

In Response to themysticalone (#19835):

The DB server is having some issues that appear to be unrelated to the usual issues it has (I think it had a load spike, though I don't know what caused that).

The helpful admin people appear to have tried to restart BIND for me, not realizing that I use tinydns [cr.yp.to] instead. Since BIND wasn't configured correctly, this poisoned the distribution of IPs until the default expiration of the bad info happened.

For more detailed explanations of why that takes a while, I turn this over to those more qualified than I...

In Response to phillip (#19849):

It takes a while for DNS to settle down after bad information because DNS is a distributed database.

Every DNS server is actually a node in the network.

Every DNS administrator decides for herself exactly how often they will synchronize their cache with the master nodes. And can decide whether or not they want to treat expired records as expired and forward the lookup upstream, or just return the last address they had.

And again, because DNS is a hierarchical distributed database, your own personal experience is determined by the people between you and the root nodes. Which is going to vary across the Internet.

It mostly works though.

I'm assuming you use tinydns because you find BIND to be insufficiently lazy?

In Response to zamphir (#19851):

• Configuration was easier.
• Security is nominally increased.
• Jerrell recommended it.

In Response to phillip (#19853):

Configuration was easier.
Right. TinyDns is lazier than BIND.

Security is nominally increased.
Right. TinyDNS is lazier than BIND.

Jerrell recommended it.
Right. Jerrell is pretty lazy.

These answers are boring.

As I said on the S*P LJ, I think it's the RaQ2's fault. Part of it's scheme to keep itself from being sold... but, no one was informed of it's ultimatium, which was delivered via morse code from the LED's on the front of it.

Checkit. Old Man Rosenberg [websnark.com].

In Response to tynic (#19876):

Yeah, that's a pretty good site. He's doing what Comixpedia should have been doing from the beginning -- publishing fresh, insightful news and commentary, every day, instead of blowing a load of 'eh' every week and then leaving me hanging.

In Response to jon (#19901):

yup, I'm addicted to it now. Comixpedia always seem a little behind everyone else on the news, and a little too eager to please when it came to reviews. But I like the articles/columns. Everything in the webcomic world has its place ...

... except PvP. It's just not funny.

In Response to phillip (#19853):

How does Jerrel communicate with you guys, anyways? Binary-encoded ASCII using 'Die' as 0 and 'Fornicate' as 1?

In Response to mcgrue (#19947):

email.