Rolling Blackouts

Another record heat day in Melbourne. Apparently, this is something that happens in fifty-year cycles or so. The last time there were this many days in a row with such high temperatures was 1952, apparently.

Anyway, the system can't cope. Trains were being cancelled all over the place, the city is experiencing widespread rolling blackouts, and things are generally not very nice in Melbourne, weather-wise or electricity-wise.

Hence, the server is still offline. Usually, I get quite agitated when this happens, but this time, I'm more okay with it. It's unfortunate and regrettable, but I'd rather have it totally shut down than risk cooking parts of it in the extraordinary heat (the server room normally has a good air conditioner in it that does the job well, but it can't cope in this heat, so better to shut down and save the system(s) than force the issue, IMHO).

Power outage

Server's offline due to a combination of power outages in and around Melbourne and extraordinary heat (43 C, that is 109.4 F). Yeah I know that's normal heat for places like, say, Phoenix or Tucson, Arizona, much of Texas, parts of Africa, and anywhere in the tropics, but for Melbourne, that's really, really out of character, and it's apparently causing all manner of problems.

No word on when the server will be back. Much depends on the electricity and on the weather, it would seem.

Twitter

I set up this blog some time ago, when I was using a different Gmail address. I have since switched and all of my Google-related stuff uses a different one. That means my mail, rss reader, various site analytics, and on and on. I cannot find any way to transfer this blog to that address, and it's a major pain in the neck to sign out (which kicks me out of Gmail and Google Reader, etc.) to blog here. So I think I may have to stop blogging here, or at least blog here only if I have something lengthy to say and I can't say it anywhere else. That seems like a fairly unusual event.

In the meantime, look for me here: http://twitter.com/bonniherself

Upgraded

Okay, the server has been upgraded. It seems to be going okay so far. We shall see...

Upgrade

Andrew upgraded the web server to Apache 2.0. He's been kind of putting it off for a while now, but he finally did it, and now he's having to fix all the things that broke. So if stuff looks totally bizarre on the server or doesn't work properly, etc. etc., that's why.

I hate upgrades.

Slashdotted?

Well, we're not positive yet, but it appears that we may have been Slashdotted. Apparently, one of my sites was featured in one of Melbourne's newspapers. It hasn't been entirely confirmed yet whether or not this was the cause for the crash, but it seems like a fairly distinct possibility.

I have to admit, the idea of being Slashdotted makes my geeky heart pretty happy. I hope it's true. Because if it's some fault with the server, we can't find any trace of it and that's never good news...

$#@%^*&~!!!!!

Down again. Don't know why. Was fine last night, other than an error message I got when I tried to post with MT, and which I passed on to Andrew, but which he didn't follow up on because I wasn't blazingly explicit about what it was. I'm going to stop writing now. I'm very, very annoyed.

Back, more or less

So, we thought at first it was some sort of denial of service attack, but we're not sure at this time. We did have a kernal panic (the error log reported it as a bug) and the entire MySQL database had to be rebuilt, but... Well, we don't know. We're just going to keep an eye on it and see. Still getting weird errors from MySQL in relation to Movable Type. Hrmm.

Server's Up

Okay, the server is up. We haven't yet had the opportunity to examine the logs fully and find out what's going on with it, but that should be accomplished soon. At the moment, Apache is not running (to prevent the server from being crashed again). It definitely looks like some sort of deliberate hammering of the server trying to break in, however. More as it develops.

Denial of Service Attack

Well, it appears we're under a Denial of Service attack. I'm not positive yet what it is, specifically, but I'm willing to make a medium-sized wager that it's something to do with Movable Type....

And, unfortunately, the person who is onsite with the server appears to be MIA. We heard from him on Saturday that he was out and would be back later in the evening and would reboot the server manually when he got back, but he didn't and we can't seem to get hold of him (his phone is turned off). I'm somewhat concerned, actually, that he's got some sort of personal emergency going on, and I don't mean that as in, "which means our server won't be rebooted any time soon". Well, there is that, but it concerns me that he's not answering and his phone is off. This just doesn't bode well.

Maybe it's a happy emergency, though. Maybe someone important had a baby or something...

Anyway, our server will be back when it's back, apparently. Unfortunate timing all around, and as for the person or persons who are slamming us with the DNOS attack, what goes around eventually comes around. I've seen it countless times, and I know that it's true.