Bernard was down for under an hour.

[Ragnar]

The server was out for a while during the last hour.

For future reference the truly insane may wish to bookmark this checker
http://status.asmallorange.com/

and look for Bernard's status, when intpforum is suddenly gone.

 

[Ragnar]

Bernard yet again

2 - 3 hours this time...

 

[Decaf]

Bernard needs a better health plan

 

[Inappropriate Behavior]

Bernard needs a better health plan

Or to stand before a "Death Panel".

 

[Ragnar]

Bis.



I'm gonna sticky this...

 

[Anthile]

Maybe it's the Bernard from Maniac Mansion. In this case we should watch out for suspicious tentacles.

 

[Wisp]

Bernard needs some good health insurance...

 

[Decaf]

Oh no! We've got to do something!

 

[Ragnar]

OK, that's another whole hour on the same day... Moving from Aldo to Bernard seems less of a good idea --- not that they even informed me of the move they made.

I spent the hour looking up alternative hosts. Which all sound much the same without personal experience of each. Global Gold sounds promising, but it's in Great Britain and American hosting offers more freedom of speech. If only until their wretched government has passed the Thought Crimes bill.*


*Yesterday, I read a slight essay 'Vanishing Liberties' published a couple of days ago. Now it has vanished down the Memory Hole itself. Here's a google cache.

Until that too is disappeared.

 

[snowqueen]

The server was out for a while during the last hour.

For future reference the truly insane may wish to bookmark this checker
http://status.asmallorange.com/

and look for Bernard's status, when intpforum is suddenly gone.

I notice they don't post about Bernard's outages on their outage forum - given how frequently it seems to happen that appears rather odd?

 

[Sapphire Harp]

I notice they don't post about Bernard's outages on their outage forum - given how frequently it seems to happen that appears rather odd?

I was noticing the same thing while we were on Aldo... The only times they listed outages were when we went down for extensive amounts of time... (like 24 hours.)

Essentially, they documented our second major crash, and one outage on either side of it, but that was all.
​

 

[Claverhouse]

Perhaps they account for it in the < 1% downtime that all hosts agree is essential.

Or my favourite explanation from their forum '...that new accounts are settling in.'

​

Claverhouse

 

[Da Blob]

FYI - the quality of the server has certainly gone down hill. I can't log on quite often. I get the "Server is busy" popup. When I have logged on the screen scrolls at random, particularly when I am trying to post(?)

Perhaps the vBulletin community might have some suggestions as to servers that are perhaps more compatible or how to improve current service... etc.?

 

[Claverhouse]

I'd doubt that the screen issue is due to the server, but the other points are serious enough.

Perhaps the vBulletin community might have some suggestions as to servers that are perhaps more compatible or how to improve current service... etc.?

The databases are fully optimized, and we use just over a third of the allotted space and two-thirds of the allowed bandwidth: there's enough room for now. I can even supply detailed server stats if anyone cares about minutiae. It comes down to the quality of this particular hardware and the sites shared thereon. ASO has definitely lost it recently, judging by the threads on their forums. It may not actually be blameworthy, but sooner or later there will have to be a move.

Asking for recommendations gets you the standard internet --- utterly useless --- surly snarl to 'Google it yourself.' ( Whilst Google has yet to reach Yahoo's level of unhelpfulness, it's doing it's best day by day ). The same level of agreeability to be found in both Windows and Linux forums where they will add an explanation to an enquirer as to why the latter doesn't want the feature they are asking for. And in the case of Linux forums, provide reasons why the enquirer is morally bankrupt for ever having suggested that they do want it.



Claverhouse

 

[Da Blob]

I'd doubt that the screen issue is due to the server, but the other points are serious enough.



The databases are fully optimized, and we use just over a third of the allotted space and two-thirds of the allowed bandwidth: there's enough room for now. I can even supply detailed server stats if anyone cares about minutiae. It comes down to the quality of this particular hardware and the sites shared thereon. ASO has definitely lost it recently, judging by the threads on their forums. It may not actually be blameworthy, but sooner or later there will have to be a move.

Asking for recommendations gets you the standard internet --- utterly useless --- surly snarl to 'Google it yourself.' ( Whilst Google has yet to reach Yahoo's level of unhelpfulness, it's doing it's best day by day ). The same level of agreeability to be found in both Windows and Linux forums where they will add an explanation to an enquirer as to why the latter doesn't want the feature they are asking for. And in the case of Linux forums, provide reasons why the enquirer is morally bankrupt for ever having suggested that they do want it.



Claverhouse

Yeah!, sorry if I insulted anyone's intelligence (a nasty habit of mine spawned in an environment of idiots in my childhood) I was just trying to provide feedback.
It may well be that my problems have their source in my own ISP, WildBlue, which has been fairly reliable over the past three years, but which has slipped in quality recently...

 

[Ragnar]

Down for 20 min. Nothing to do with Bernard. An Eaccelerator crash. I replaced the class_core.php and it started again. Something to do with caching...

 

[Ragnar]

Around 45 minutes, again not Bernard but our old friend:

has more than 'max_user_connections' active connections

Something to do with mysql. As I was concurrently downloading a mysql backup ( which is unconnected ) this was alarming since restoring a broken backup would not be ideal...

IF anyone's heard of anything of this outfit good or bad, http://www.urljet.com/ they may like to mention it. Since they appear to be optimised for vBull, their cheapest package [ this is a small board, and though the monthly bandwidth is hitting 25 GB, there are rarely more than 10 - 20 people actually doing anything at the same time ] would be not that much more than ASO and they handle the import free...


*******


At the time this started I was trying to figure out why the Youtubes handled by the AME hack had disappeared since yesterday. At the best guess it is because I unwisely ran maintenance. According to post 710 of the AME thread. Which is essentially unanswered. I'm gonna go with the view that hack authors should take into account that people may optimize/repair etc...

Actually the whole of vBulletin is a mess when it comes to inline display of media. Half the hacks for mp3s, flvs et al don't work and those that do, as in this case, are not perfect. Other board software manages this sort of thing natively, but not vBulletin since they are scared of repercussions from German Law --- THREAD --- Which is losing it's traditional light touch and going ape on internet privacy/copyright/censorshop/misuse/control-of-bad-thoughts.




EDIT: Madly, in this very post the AME system appears to have begun working, since it lit up a thread link, which is not the purpose but one must take what one can get in this life...


ReEDIT: Apparently no, AME links are still screwed.

 

[Anthile]

At this point I think that everything is better than ASO. That urljet company looks serious, though.

 

[Da Blob]

And the INTPian forces were gathered on the hilltop silently consulting their Muses, when at the sound of the trumpet they raised their voices as one and shouted "Death to Bernard the Betrayer!!!"


I keep getting a popup saying that the site owner has exceeded their bandwidth when I try to get on the forum... plus I have lost several posts because of something happening when I hit the "submit" icon...(?)

EDIT: or something NOT happening when I hit the 'submit' icon...

 

[Ragnar]

I made your last post into a new thread, since it was not to do with Bernard's tenuous hold upon reality.

Yeah, the bandwidth was exceeded around 9pm GMT. I contacted ASO and they restored it for $1 --- standard fees. Otherwise it would have had to wait for 6-7 hours til the month's turn at 12 midnight EST.


This month bandwidth has shot up. The limit is 25 GB, and yesterday there was 23 GB used, I gambled this would be enough for 24 hours. July was just 6.73GB and June 12.74GB; although previous months have hit higher, the max was 17GB.


:smiley_emoticons_mr

 

[fullerene]

no harm done, hehe. Reopening the forum was bound to do that.... the activity will probably dwindle significantly in future months.

 

[Jesin]

*Yesterday, I read a slight essay 'Vanishing Liberties' published a couple of days ago. Now it has vanished down the Memory Hole itself.

Umm, here's the original link. It's not gone; I can still see it.

If you still can't, maybe you should try a proxy? (During the last several weeks when we were on Aldo, I needed a proxy to access the forum.)

 

[Ragnar]

Nice it came back. However where I live my broadband is so astoundingly slow, currently 1.13 mb/s that using a proxy would be unwise. Although I can see that for those living in semi-totalitarian theocracies such as Iran or the USA they may be a necessity.

 

[Jesin]

Heh, I think it was my ISP having routing problems or something. I couldn't ping the server, and traceroute was consistently hanging on the same step. For a while it was just this site, but then I had the same problem with several other websites, which lasted for about 2-4 days and then got better. I think we switched to Bernard during those 2-4 days, not sure.

 

[Ragnar]

Bernard has been flickering off and on several times today. Be prepared for a sudden outage.

 

[Jesin]

yeah, I noticed it go down for about 5-7 minutes earlier today.

 

[Ragnar]

Well, firstly to deal with the truly lunatic numbers of spiders using bandwidth --- today's front page records 1425 visitors in the last 24 hours, and only identifies around 100 as spiders, which shows either we have a vast audience, considering about 110+ members visit each day, or that most visiting are bots --- I've updated the robots.txt file and the spiders.xml and in the first included a ferocious time-limit text found online ( from 2006 sadly ) limiting as the main ones to 120 minutes between visits; and disallowing many useless ones.

At present, noting that ASO recently instituted Apache 2.2, I turned off gzip in vBulletin and am about to try turning on mod_deflate > compress content in CPanel. This is entirely on intuition since I have no idea about all this stuff.

The spider limits should cut down on queries; the different compression may make loading faster.

 

[Cogwulf]

According to an internet ranking site I've looked at, 40% of visits this week were from search engines, and that's up from a 25% 3 month average, and there are a lot of visits coming from from typelogic.com, so perhaps at least half of those are genuine visitors

[EDIT]I've just looked up how that website calculates rankings and that makes what I said pretty much irrelevant

 

[Ragnar]

Interesting... Mind you, I discovered one such site which lost us 1000 entirely notional* dollars in one update. http://www.valuatemysite.com/www.intpforum.com

Just now it's $4,061: before I hit update it was $5243.


And it's estimating the value of all the non-existent adverts...




* Bearing in mind that fiat money is entirely notional anyway; and that even if it wasn't, the last two presidents have been printing money like confetti, which kinda makes it notional doubled, and that the USA is being kept afloat by China funding their debt, which is, if I'm not mistaken, notional doubled and squared.

 

[Cogwulf]

Yeah, that's using the alexa rankings which is what I was looking at, it only gathers information from people who've downloaded their toolbar, so it only works as a rough estimation of true site traffic

 

[Ragnar]

Bernard was down for half an hour: however, that's nothing... As when Sherman went through where the servers now live, 95% of ASO's servers were out cold.

Thanks to some technical stuff involving Techs Entering the Cage all is now restored to bucolic calm.

 

[walfin]

Was there any outage? For a while it said bandwidth exceeded.

 

[Ragnar]

The forum was out of action due to being over bandwidth for approx 6 hours --- for half that time they did not respond to a ticket, no doubt since it was so early in Atlanta.

We have gone through 25GB in 17 days... I blame the spiders.

 

[Cogwulf]

About how much bandwidth does the arcade take up?

 

[Ragnar]

This afternoon the bandwidth went again which means the extra 6GB bought on the 17th lasted nearly five days... This time a further 8GB was ordered which may last to the start of Oct or not.

However after that Bernard coughed then went down again; first the HTTP, then the Mail ( which is not used ) and the MySql finally followed. And no I dunno why these things are separate since this is just one package. Lasted an hour.

I'm deathly fond of Steampunk, but I'm beginning to feel Bernard is constructed as a massive building like the Clock Tower in Thief III and I'd start to prefer something more modern...


Perhaps the Arcade uses a proportion of the bandwidth --- detailed information is hard to come by on shared hosting --- but I doubt more than a couple play each day. The hosts recommended turning off the Chat, and I shall for the next week; but again it seems hardly used, most chatters using /irc...

 

[Ragnar]

We were AWOL for around --- by guess --- 2 hours due to a mysql crash on users. So I logged into PhpMyAdmin and repaired all the tables.

Normally one would do this through vBulletin, yet the crash ensured that the Admin Panel was also affected...


:smiley_emoticons_mr

 

[snowqueen]

Thank you for your continuing commitment to keeping the forum alive - I, for one, appreciate it.

 

[Ragnar]

Members and viewers may have noticed the place was suspended for the previous 4 - 5 hours.

I became aware whilst uploading a couple more smilies, when suddenly the FTP started logging and relogging in --- FileZilla being pretty bad, I scarcely considered it until I went back to the forum and found my IP had been blocked for repeatedly posting logins.

Just then I thought the site was down for everybody; after a while they responded to my ticket and said it was just I affected and unblocked the IP. Going back to the forum I discovered that the site was indeed suspended. It's taken them these hours to get back to the various tickets and reactivate us.

During this whole time there was not one email or other warning saying the site was suspended... Only 7/24 watching of the site is supposed to let one know things are awry.


Anyway, I spent the time chatting to UrlJet ( see above ) about moving the site to them at vast, but reasonable, expense. They provide for only slightly more, shared hosting on their vbStarter providing 4 X the Space, which is inessential but nice, and 4 X the bandwidth, which is vital. Also they do the move once I have recovered the nameserver info, which is not available from ASO.

And they do hourly back-ups.

​

 

[loveofreason]

I say we send our friend here > to cancel business at ASO.

 

[NoID10ts]

This site is starting to remind me of whack-a-mole.

QUICK!

POST BEFORE IT DISAPPEARS AGAIN!

HURRY!

Winner is the one that can slip the most posts in during it's up times.

 

[Ragnar]

Well, the 8 extra GB added on the 21st added to the 6 previous on the 17th ran out yesterday about 11 GMT.

A few hours later ( 10pm their time) I sent a ticket to ASO asking for 4GB, which was soon answered by a tech moving the ticket to Billing to process. Although Billing is not at home on Sundays. Probably at Church.

For nearly 17 hours, despite reminders, more tickets and emails, nothing happened. Now it is back on, and this 4GB will have to last till the end of the month. If it closes bandwidth again, we'll have to wait till the start of October, Georgia US time. In the meantime I'll suspend the arcade.


It can be noted that in all previous months prior to August ( which did not go over the 25GB ) usage varied from 6GB to 14GB a month, which means for all that time we used far less bandwidth than our quota.


Still, early on I decided use the time to do a full back-up ( about 500MB ), which normally would knock out the forum for an hour and a half...


We shall move to UrlJet as soon as I can find the name-server settings: there is a problem in that I first registered the name with zzz in July 2007, renewed in 2008 which covered up to August; but zzz didn't show it when I paid my domain names ( I thought I must have registered it elsewhere, with ASO ) this July and it is now with namecheap ( resellers for ENOM, as are zzz ). I've fired off emails to zzz, namecheap, UrlJet and ASO trying to find how and when namecheap got hold off it. After all the site still works as before and hasn't been hijacked, so no-one has anything to gain.


If anyone sees a sad little missing domain name, his home is here.

 

[Ragnar]

Update:

Actually, it's possible that the domain name is lost --- not that that is the end.

My registrars NameAlerts replied: [FONT=&quot]This domain expired in June 2009 and has subsequently been deleted in accordance with ICANN’s deletion procedure and then registered by a third party through NameCheap. Information about the current registrant is not available as he/she is using a WHOIS privacy protection service.


[/FONT][FONT=&quot]This is fascinating[/FONT][FONT=&quot] since I originally bought/invented the name from them in July 2007. But I paid for the next year early, in June 2008[/FONT][FONT=&quot]; [/FONT][FONT=&quot]therefore I imagined that it was safe until July 2009, when indeed I paid the invoices as usual, not noticing the omission --- and/or thinking I had registered it with ASO.

Apart from this. NameAlerts sent no warning emails, nor provided the 30 day grace period or the following 40 day redemption period. After all, I renewed my invoices in July, which would fall into that allowance.

In the meantime, someone else owns the name through Namecheap, but has continued to let the site run as normal. Whether this is some benefactor or some snapper for profit barely matters, the only important thing is until they reply through Namecheap --- if they do --- the name-servers can't be changed for UrlJet hosting.

If there's no reply --- and even if there is I would not be held for blackmail unless the sum was trivial --- I should think it ought to be possible to register a new almost identical name and have UrlJet do the move then point the new address to their servers. But that's only if the worse came to the worst. There may be other solutions.


Preferably involving ninjas.
[/FONT][FONT=&quot]
[/FONT]

 

[loveofreason]

What a very peculiar state of affairs....

*wonders if ShaiGar secretly bought us*

 

[Tyria]

^^ It would be a diabolical plot... too bad about the arcade though. McMolen and I were fighting for first place.

 

[Ragnar]

Actually Claverhouse, who works closely with me on this, told me that having a Twitter account used for nothing but updates on this forum during downtime, therefore barely seen --- http://twitter.com/Claverhouse --- mentioned that Richard began following him on that this morning.

Which C. promptly reciprocated out of professional courtesy.

http://twitter.com/ShaiGar


Were it he I would be not faintly concerned. More likely it's one of those odd harvesting machines for expiring domains. But NameAlerts do not seem to have behaved well; I'll be looking to transfer any other domains they hold for me*.



* Actually, I just read that in the distant start of the Web, there once was a time when all registrations were the responsibility of only one all-powerful monolithic body. Then some deregulation or something freed it all into utter chaos enabling the new criminality associated with net hijackers and bandits. Rather like imperfect Russia in 1912 and insane Russia about 1919.

 

[Ragnar]

McMolen and I were fighting for first place.

Does MrMolen play in the Arcade then ?

 

[Tyria]

I might have spelled his name wrong, but yes. He is currently the leader there.

 

[loveofreason]

MrMolen is eating our bandwidth!

ShaiGar offered to take us under his wing during the Great Ragnarian Absence.

I politely declined.

Or maybe I wasn't that polite... wait, no. I was surely diplomatic.

<3 ShaiGar.

:smiley_emoticons_mr

 

[Sapphire Harp]

Do you mind explaining Shaigar? All I've heard has been villification for something or some things which happened long before I ever got here.
​

 

[Claverhouse]

Oh, Shai's OK. Started off as a vigorous teen genius on INTPC, for which vigour I temp-banned him at least 12 times. But he was always a sport about it and never complained once, which is grateful when you deal with a flock of little drama-queens.

Then he went on to the now perhaps defunct intpunderworld of radical malcontents from INTPC, but he was though sometimes allied with the EMO Wing at the latter, too independent to be of them.

Whilst I wouldn't want him as a boss, he's fine as an enlivening member. He's painfully honest, but I can always keep on temp-banning him.


Maybe for eternity if the Cycle beliefs of Eternal Recurrence are true.


What a prospect.



Claverhouse