Latest Announcements from the Forums

2008-08-18: I Can Haz Job!
Sorry, couldn't resist the lolcats-speak. But yes, I've recently been hired to a new job. I'll be a level 2 linux system administrator for a company called Rackspace. I'll be working the night shift, 10pm to 9am (CST), 4 days a week. I actually prefer the night shift, and the 4-day work week is a major bonus to me as well. The job starts next Monday, August 25th. This shouldn't really impact xepher.net in any big way, save that I'll be unavailable for that 11 hour chunk of time while at work. The upside is that I'll be getting a real paycheck again, and the expense of running Xepher.net out of my own pocket won't be as painful anymore.

I'm really pretty excited about the job. I'll be doing almost exactly the sort of stuff I do for xepher.net, but getting paid for it. The company looks to be pretty awesome as well, having been ranked as one of the best places to work in IT by several magazines (like ComputerWorld, Fortune, etc.) Touring their offices, I saw people with giant pirate flags over their work areas, arcade machines mixed among the desks, break areas with 360s and PS3s hooked up to plasma TVs, ice cream vending machines... all sorts of really cool stuff. I get a pretty good benefits package as well, and it'll be nice working with other nerds again. Heck, during my last interview, one of the guys actually asked me if I preferred Dilbert or XKCD. XKCD! I like to think that's the thing that got me the job, but really, it's just a really promising sign about personality types... especially compared to my last place of work, where no one in the entire office had even HEARD of Zelda, much less read XKCD.

The spectral wolf fears only fire! :-P ...
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2008-07-16: Downtime and Routing Issues
So I'll start this off by saying "It's not my fault, please don't hit me!" :-) The datacenter hosting xepher.net had a backbone link go down around 2 or 3am CDT this morning, which cut off access to xepher.net for about 1/3 of the internet. That is, most people could still get through, but many couldn't, and it just depended on where you were, and what route your connection came in through. The DC issued an announcement about it, and say they should have it under control now, with only some minor slowdown remaining. I'm not exactly thrilled with their service on this, as they'd been having interrmitent problems of this type for nearly a month now, and each time they claimed to fix it, it came back up. I may be considering a new datacenter if they have many more issues like this, as my patience is wearing thing (and I'm sure that's true for the rest of you too.) Hopefully this one was major enough that they really did fix it and not just tweak something. Anyway, if you (or one of your readers/visitors) is still having trouble connecting, all we can do is wait. Sorry! ...
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2008-07-02: Happy Canada Day!
Oh, and happy Independance Day for those of us in the US. Xepher.net continues to chug along pretty reliably as of late, so no major problems to report. A small hiccup the other day with /tmp/ filling up, but it was only affecting things for a couple hours. Just a reminder to anyone submitting a problem/outage report... most of the time these end up being local/semi-local/ISP problems on the reporter's end, ocasionally a problem with the datacenter/backbone routing at this end, and rarely an actual problem with xepher.net itself. Still, I like to take all problem reports seriously, so if you do see a problem or can't connect, feel free to let me know. It's very helpful though if you give me an exact time when you noticed a problem, preferably in UTC, but at the very least, specify what timezone/offset you're in. Also, any network information you know how to get (like traceroutes) is always useful. Send me whatever you got, and I'll look into things. Likewise, if you get error messages or other such things, give me all the info you can.

I'm currently tracking (aka, I think I fixed it, but I'm not sure) a transient problem involving an SSL "Change Cipher Spec". This only really applies when you're visiting the secure sections (user-services, webmail, or phpMyAdmin) of the site (no user sites are affected.) But if you run into this (your browser will give an error about "change cipher spec" and not load a secure page), please let me know. Note: this is seperate from the issue with the self-signed certificate which is mentioned on the help page. ...
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2008-04-11: Unexpected Downtime
The datacenter that houses Arclight (the xepher.net server) went down for several hours early this morning. It seems to be back up now, but it was up and down quite a bit, so I'm not counting any chickens before they're hatched. Anyway, not much I can do about it... I noted that uptime had gone from 43 days to 15 minutes a few hours ago, then I lost all contact with the system. Finally got a support request through and got the server restored, but it's back to 10 minutes uptime. I think they had some fairly major problems they're not really wanting to tell us about. Either that, or just "coincidentally" the xepher.net server went down twice in 4 hours, with a report from the datacenter of a "brief outage" right in the middle of that timeframe. Considering the server didn't even go completely down when a hard drive failed, I think it's much more likely their power grid reset a few times tonight and they just don't want to admit it.

Anyway, shouldn't be a big deal, just letting everyone know why things were unavailable for a few hours. ...
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2008-02-19: Short Downtime On Thursday (Now Completed!)
Update: The new drive is in and working. Things'll be a tad slow for about two hours or so while it rebuilds the array, but after that we're back to full data integrity and performance.

The server is getting a failed drive replaced on Thursday. The replacement should take about 30 minutes, and occur sometime in the afternoon or early evening (US CST) of February 21st. Shouldn't be a big deal, and most people probably won't even notice, but just wanted to let everyone know in advance. If something goes wrong, or you can't connect for more than an hour, feel free to ask me for a status update via AIM. My screen name there is Xepher42. ...
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