Server Migration

Howdy Folks!

I know it’s been quite awhile since I posted and I apologize for not keeping up with this blog.

Now on to the really big news:

• The server that hosted the majority of our sites is being retired. (Les)
• We were migrating sites to a newer server. (Todd)
• We are now migrating sites to the newest server. (Larry)

What does this mean for you?

1. Your site will load much faster for all visitors.
2. Your site might go down temporarily as we wipe the dust off and move your site.
3. Your email might not deliver immediately when migrate your site. (Bare with us!)
4. The newest server is much more powerful and reliable.
5. The newest server has a diesel generator and battery backup (see more reliable).

We thank you in advance for your patience during the migration of sites.
If you notice your site being down for more than 8 hours please contact me immediately.

Thanks again.
The Lead Admin.

SSH Public Key Authentication

Tonight I disabled password authentication entirely for ssh.
If you haven’t set up public key authentication yet feel free to contact me or possibly read a how-to:

Like this one.

This security setting was a long time coming I’ve gotten rather tired of going through all the “script kiddie” failed login attempts.
I apologize if this makes this a bit more inconvenient for anyone but security does / has to come first after all.

That’s all for now.

SPeeDY (mod_spdy)

So tonight I rebuilt the spdy module and enabled it server wide.

If you happen to be a Google Chrome or Firefox user any SSL enabled sites should feel quite a bit faster on load.

Please let me know immediately if you have loading issues or the server has any hiccups (error 500 or cloudflare placeholder pages) via the regular channels (support site / email)

Thanks and as always enjoy!

09-05-2012: I have disabled spdy for the time being as it was having issues with our php install.

Site Launches

So I finally launched the new web site for Inexistence.org around 4 am this morning.
Now my site matches the design of it as well so you’ll know off the bat that they are related.

I’ve got quite a bit of changes in the pipeline for Inexistence.org users and I’ll be cross
posting here and on the main site (it has a blog section now).

Don’t forget we’re also on Facebook and Google+.
Don’t have a “company” Twitter account but you can always follow mine.

More news coming soon…

The Move

So the server has landed at my house.
All DNS records have been updated and sites should be working immediately.
(If I manage your DNS that is.)

If you manage your DNS records you need to point it to 24.172.198.146 ASAP.

More to come as I’m still working on stuff..

PS. Please note this can take up to 48 hours for the rest of the internet to
catch up with the DNS changes. If you’re using OpenDNS right now everything
should work for you.

Move Imminent

So we finally narrowed down a replacement ISP.
We are moving to business class cable provided by Time Warner (static ip as usual).
The server will be moving in with me and this basically means almost 24/7 tech support.

The bad news this is going to cost me quite a bit of money.

So if you are a free account be prepared for a change to quotas and bandwidth throttling.
(Especially if you’ve never donated to Inexistence.org)
I apologize for the upcoming change but free rides don’t last forever.
(At least not without some change to the ride.)

So if you’re interested in not having those applied to your account I would seriously consider
contacting me. As it is right now around 95% of the users haven’t contributed anything to the
operations of the server. You know who you are and so do we if you don’t want this applied
and wish to move off the server, I will of course assist you.

Sorry again for the downtime but as far as the reliability we’ve done pretty good for 10 years.
This was the first major outage we’ve had to date.
(Sure we’ve had the occasional service interruption for a hour or two randomly but that’s been rather rare)

I’ll be posting more info on the move as it gets closer to happening.