Well I’ve brushed up on a lot of my skills with DNS, apache, SMTP/POP mailboxes, authentication, MySQL and all relevant tuning thereof. I’m happy to say that I’m 99.9% sure that everything is running as it should be.

You may well have had some problems with NSMnow over the last few days with some of our active links (namely barnyard2) being down. They should all be up and running again and if not I’m sure you’ll let us know in due course.

Now it’s time to get on with some more coding.

Well it’s been a little up and down with the transition. The website was there, then it wasn’t, then it was there again, suffice to say I have brushed up on my DNS do(s) and don’t(s).

If  you’ve been sending to the mailing lists then chances are you will be receiving some bounces in the near future, if you haven’t already. This is due to the mailing setups not quite ready yet. This may take a little longer than anticipated, but will encourage you to use the comments here and we’ll work from there.

Once all is up and rocking again, we’ll let you know.

Fingers crossed!

If you ask me this is way overdue, but we’ve finally bitten the bullet and have a new host provider. As a result this weekend you may experience some unavailability as we transition.

We ask that you please bare with us and we definitely try to minimise the downtime.

Everything should be humming along by Sunday night! If you don’t here from me by then you know something went terribly wrong!

Consider this a small digression from a software update and an opportunity for a little venting of frustration and discontent at our current webhosting provider.

You may or may not have noticed some peculiarities with the website in the past 24 hours. Let me provide you some of the context behind these shenanigans.

Last night during a small development session and our NSMnow-1.2 branch, I noticed that some packages were not being retrieved from our website. No dramas, it’s probably my router crapping out again. It’s a good time for a break and the router will correct itself shortly.

15 minutes later …

So I’m watching “An American Haunting” with my girl and get a text from coops indicating the website is down for him as well. Hmmm … maybe this is more serious. So I open firefox and directly navigate to the page. It’s not there … Arrggh!!!

Coops calls and it appears as if the DNS has changed. That’s weird our webhost didn’t let us know they were changing. We manage webhosting separately to our DNS and were certain we would get some notification of any changes. Continuing on, a nslookup on the new webhost IPs and name server IPs and reflecting them on our DNS provider a short time later had the site back up and running. Sweet!

How wrong were we, the server that was hosting was only current as of Oct 15, 2008. That’s a month of work missing. WTF?!

Jumping on the phone to get some answers we were very displeased with some of the following answers:

• “We didn’t inform you because there was no downtime on our hosting servers”
• “I’m sorry Sir, we cannot access the old servers to copy your information across”

Bloody Help Desk! … Serenity Now!! … Serenity Now!!!

Fortunately our backup regime is reasonably frequent so now things should be back to normal. We aplogise for any inconvenience.

Thanks for listening, I feel better now.