Annals of the Homestarmy - Ooops

SSL Certificate and SSH Key Updated

nospam@example.com (Ancient of Days) — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 19:07:48 -0600

If you have been using SSL or SSH to access any of your joeysmith.com, hashphp.org, or homestarmy.com services, please be aware that our previous certificates and keys have expired. I have generated a new one, and your software should prompt you on connect to approve the certificate/key.

SSL information:
SHA1 Fingerprint: 3261 57CE 794D 216D 7411 AB45 19EC F2CE 254A FD9B
MD5 Fingerprint: 850A 6195 5B5D EA5D 9D0F 36B4 9FC1 F819

SSH Fingerprint:
4e:6d:6f:6b:53:1c:50:f7:1b:dc:98:9c:c8:49:8b:cf

If you feel you need to contact me to verify this post, please don't hesitate to use my Google Voice information or my personal cell phone.

Blog Software Updated

nospam@example.com (Ancient of Days) — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 13:02:58 -0600

To all authors: Please login to the blog as soon as possible. I have upgraded the software used, and when you login, it needs to update the encrypted version of your password. It's time-sensitive as, if you wait too long, the software will automatically lock you out. If you're having any trouble getting in, please let me know ASAP - the longer it goes without being fixed, the harder it is to fix. Thanks, and sorry for the disruption.

Site Maintenance: Cleaning up Categories

nospam@example.com (Ancient of Days) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:05:22 -0700

I am cleaning up our list of categories. Due to under-use, the following categories (each of which has fewer than 10 posts) will be removed unless someone speaks up in the next 48 hours to object.

Birdwood, NE
Book Club
Fantasy Sports
Soccer
Snowshoeing
Poetry
Perplex City
Fullness of Times
Lies, lies, lies
Star Trek
Quick
Gifted And Talented
Nilsson's Web
Stories
OotS
Alpha Shade
Veronica Mars
Lost
Rock Band

Because uncategorized posts are unreachable, I will attach the posts to an author-specific category instead, as best as I can, and file the remainder under "Personal Entry".

The Internet Is Serious Business

nospam@example.com (The Mad Giggler) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:30:00 -0700

MG:
http://www.davincivirtual.com/virtual-office-locations/location.asp?l=603 check out the technology they used for this virtual tour
Author's note: If they change this, I've included the current technology below the fold.

Continue reading "The Internet Is Serious Business"

Recommendation Fail

nospam@example.com (The Mad Giggler) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 10:36:03 -0600

I clicked on the "Recommendations" section of Amazon today on a whim. As I was going through the list of fantasy books, video game accessories, and alternative music albums, I noticed something a little out of place. Curious to know why it had made the list, I clicked the "Why was this recommended for me?" link. To my surprise, this was the result.
Continue reading "Recommendation Fail"

00:37:17 up 36 min

nospam@example.com (Ancient of Days) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:37:05 -0600

Well, I finally made it over to the data center to complete the physical inspection of our box. In the process, I rebooted it - 516 days of time, gone.

Everything checked out on the hardware, although if any of you have a spare 1U case, or a DRR1 333Mhz stick of RAM (in anything greater than 512MB) laying around, our (recently turned) 5 years old server would probably appreciate some new life.

The Homestarmy Offline

nospam@example.com (Ancient of Days) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 11:23:07 -0600

thehomestarmy.com and its associated domains (joeysmith.com, hashphp.org and wingedwolves.com) will be offline tonight for a few hours so I can perform some system maintenance. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Why you shouldn't hire crappy programmers

nospam@example.com (Radar) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:30:00 -0600

I came across the notes for a support item that I thought you all might enjoy:

It will never crash again. It will never output broken images again. Old <crappy programmers name removed> code cleaned up. It will run faster with less calls. But functionality wise the schema of these tables has left me confused.

ProjectGallery is the top level.
ProjectGalleryDate has a FK to ProjectGallery and ProjectImage
ProjectImage has a FK to ProjectGallery and ProjectGalleryDate
There is also a join between ProjectImage and ProjectGallery

This nested mess makes no sense at all. It is like a father with two daughters that are also both the mother of each other while grandchildren exist as well with nothing but the grandfather as a parent? Huh? Total and complete schema fail.

I have replaced the mess with pulling the top 1 image that is a child of a gallery directly for the moment. Thats the cleanest and most direct relationship. But how this is supposed to work? I have no idea.

I Want His Job

nospam@example.com (The Mad Giggler) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 15:12:39 -0600

So we recently built a new site with online ordering for a company with 400+ franchises in multiple countries. It was a bit stressful for me taking the site live, and we pulled some long hours to work around a few oddities in the hosting environment. None of this was helped by the guy who is supposed to be in charge of the site (the client's head of IT). Then today, we get this awesome email from him.

I am the IT Admin for the <Client X> site and I do not have access to the File Manager portion of the <Hosting Environment> Admin site to archive the logs. Is this something that your admin has access to or could grant me access?

<Name Redacted>

Site Outage Notification

nospam@example.com (Ancient of Days) — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 23:29:32 -0600

If everything goes as planned, thehomestarmy.com, wingedwolves.com and joeysmith.com will be offline starting Friday afternoon at about 3pm through Sunday morning while we validate our backups and test recovery scenarios.

Stupid Cops

nospam@example.com (The Mad Giggler) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 15:08:16 -0700

This is why I'm not a server admin

nospam@example.com (The Mad Giggler) — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 08:08:02 -0700

XMission Outage
---------------

XMission experienced a serious outage while we were performing some
standard UPS maintenance today. The outage affected all services and
started at approximately 2:00 p.m. on Tuesday, November 11th. Network
services for many were partially restored by about 2:30 p.m. but some
other services required a lot of attention and took much longer.

Details
-------
About 40% of our data center, including our server room, suffered a power
outage when a technician flipped a mislabled breaker during some standard
maintenance on one of our 3 UPS units. Although the power outage was
momentary, servers and routers often respond very poorly to losing power
and sometimes take extensive work to come back up. Unfortunately, such was
the case today with many systems.

Seriously Affected Systems
--------------------------
** An important router, which some connections and servers rely on,
required extensive attention from our network administrators.

** DNS (Domain Name Service) was sporadic for some customers for over an
hour.

** Email services were down for over 5 hours.

** Web hosting suffered the longest outage because our NetApp storage
appliance which houses all customer files and web sites lost multiple
hard drives. As a result, we are currently restoring files to our new
NetApp 2020 from our November 9th backup, which will take many hours
yet to complete. We recently purchased this new NetApp and were merely
days away from getting it online.

Conclusion
----------
Today's outage was exascerbated by multiple systems responding poorly to
losing power. In spite of the holiday, our systems administrators were on
site within minutes and continue to work tirelessly to restore all
services. In the end, we should have performed this maintenance on a day
when our systems administrators were on site because problems can arise no
matter how carefully you proceed.

Blog Maintenance

nospam@example.com (Ancient of Days) — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 17:57:40 -0600

Our blog has finally outgrown my Pentium 3 with 256MB of RAM - I'm shuffling things around to make it work a little better. In the meantime, you may see some outages or other strange messages. Please bear with me.

Upgraded

nospam@example.com (Ancient of Days) — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:00:18 -0600

s9y upgraded to 1.3.1
PHP upgraded to 5.2.6
Apache upgraded to 2.2.8

Let me know if anything's broken.

From the New Game Show

nospam@example.com (The Mad Giggler) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:56:00 -0600

He Said It

MG:
so you're coming up for Rock Band and Racquetball, right?

AoD:
OH, YES

MG:
great

AoD:
That's like asking someone if they're up for a great meal, a nice hotel, and awesome sex. Clearly Ming's is the great meal, I'll leave you to deduce the other two relationships

My lords, my ladies (and everybody else here not sitting on a cushion! ) let me present a link to a comment AoD made this week.

Continue reading "From the New Game Show"