Notification of system downtime

Posted September 9, 2009 at 12:14 EDT under site announcements. Updated November 8, 2009 at 10:15 EST.

OpenBSD 4.6 is out, which means it's upgrade time soon. You should buy a copy, too, because times is tough. This is a cheap way to help maintain high-quality software.

Anyway, I'll be taking the entire Eco-Monkey Data Services down for the upgrade sometime this week or the next. I'll update this entry with the usual 15-minute warning before I push the Big Red Button.

Or maybe you don't care. Which is ok, I guess. Maybe hug the next kernel hacker you see, instead?

Well, ok. I ought to get around to this today. Expect all Eco-Monkey hosted sites to be unavailable for about an hour, and maybe general connectivity to be spotty this afternoon.

    What just happened?

Posted October 2, 2009 at 05:10 EDT under site announcements.

This site was unavailable for the better part of a day because I forget to renew the domain subscription. Oops.

I managed to renew it before some domain lurker stole it out from underneath me. Because, you know, clevermonkey.org is such a hot property.

Things should be back to normal now. For reasonably low values of normal.

    That is not a small number

Posted May 27, 2009 at 11:59 EDT under site announcements.

The RSS feed for this site was broken in 72 different places. Now it is not, at least according to the RSS/Atom/KML validation tool I'm using.

I blame the godless leftist abortionists for this failure.

    Notification of system downtime

Posted May 27, 2009 at 06:44 EDT under site announcements.

All hosted Eco-Monkey World Domination, Inc. sites will be unavailable Thursday and Friday mornings (EST) for core upgrades by our internet provider.

There will be two separate disruptions:

• Thursday, May 28, 0000-0600h EST
• Friday, May 29, 0000-0600h EST

Please do not sit at your computer pressing refresh for six hours on these two days. Unless you really want to. In which case, knock your bad self out.

    Notification of system downtime

Posted April 28, 2009 at 04:36 EDT under site announcements. Updated May 3, 2009 at 10:57 EDT.

OpenBSD 4.5.

Downtime necessary to pick it up.

There will be a 15 minute warning.

You know the drill.

[update] 15 minute warning.

[update] The thing is done. Had some kernel update issues, which is why it took so long. But, this is the result:

OpenBSD odin.clevermonkey.org 4.5 ODIN#0 i386

Everything seems in order, other than some trivial system tweaks that should not be visible to y'all.

    OpenBSD sysmerge, I love you man!

Posted February 19, 2009 at 10:58 EST under site announcements.

I just upgraded Eco-Monkey World Domination, Inc. to OpenBSD 4.4, along with all the other acronyms and goodies that make all Eco-Monkey hosted sites go. Hopefully nothing went pear-shaped at your end. Send me an email if things have gone awry somehow.

I'll probably have to bounce the main server one more time this week to pick up the patches I'm building right now.

I'm only a little behind my original upgrade schedule. It's almost time for OpenBSD 4.5.

    On blogs, comments and Content Management Systems

Posted February 14, 2009 at 12:21 EST under site announcements.

From the infrastructure-is-boring dept.:

To date, I've had exactly two requests to allow comments on this blog, especially since I often use the lame rhetorical technique of ending paragraphs with a question. Did you think the number would be higher?

The problem with this is twofold:

1. The bit of PHP that presents these words to you does not support comments.
2. I'm way too fucking lazy to add the functionality myself.

Seriously, though, adding comments to the blog would be a little more surgery that I would like to perform on the single file of PHP I swiped off the internet, lo, those many years ago.

Y'see, back in 2001 I'm not sure I even understood what a blog was, or was supposed to be. There were no fancy Content Management Systems to choose from. I did a 2-minute web search (I believe this was also before the Google hegemony) and found Personal Weblog, a hunk of PHP I could just insert into any page. It was necessarily utilitarian, and it's still at version 1.0.

[Read the rest...]

    Bigger, longer than ever before

Posted January 22, 2009 at 11:46 EST under site announcements.

Some items of (potential) interest:

I tweaked the main page of the blog to display 25 articles (instead of 10) to accommodate the daily posting policy. This may make some user-agents load much slower, and may have confused RSS readers. There is not much I can do about the former (at least, not without a lot of hacking) and the latter should sort itself out if you make the right gestures in your RSS reader.

I really, really have to take the time to install OpenBSD 4.4. I might do this at the last minute this week-end. I'll try to give everyone a 15-minute warning if this happens.

And, yes: site announcements satisfy the daily blogging requirement.

    Puffy shot first.

Posted November 3, 2008 at 07:08 EST under site announcements.

OpenBSD 4.4 is out, which means it's time for some scheduled downtime.

I've actually had the 4.4 media in my hands for some time (if you purchase early, they send it early) but kept putting off the upgrade because the last thing I want to do is more work at the computer.

However, tracking each release every 6 months is not unreasonable, and there are all sorts of improvements to various daemons and drivers I should pick up.

I'd like to just schedule downtime for a specific date and time, and stick to that schedule, but I'll probably just get fired up and decide to do it at the last minute sometime this week or over the next weekend. This means that every Eco-Monkey World Domination hosted service will be unavailable for about an hour or so.

I'll post an update here about an hour before I down the server.

    Scheduled downtime

Posted October 6, 2008 at 09:14 EDT under site announcements.

I didn't think I'd have to do this until OpenBSD 4.4 comes out, but it looks like we might have some scheduled downtime this week.

Our internet provider has notified me that they are upgrading some equipment which may force some of their customers to go offline. This may result in all Eco-Monkey hosted services becoming inaccessible.

In a continuing effort to improve our systems, we are planning a series of upgrades/changes over several days, starting next week. These changes are to increase the capacity of our network as well as add additional redundancy and security.

The first maintenance window is on Wednesday Oct 8, 2008, starting at 12:00 AM up to 6:00AM Eastern Standard Time. During this window we anticipate intermittent connectivity as we upgrade and implement our equipment. The subsequent upgrades will occur on Thursday Oct 9, 2008 (12AM - 6AM) and Friday Oct 10, 2008 (12AM - 6AM).

During this time, all services may be affected including but not limited to: Dial up, DSL, co-location, hosting, and dedicated connection clients.

We will be installing and moving equipment which may affect all connections... an interruption in service is likely to occur.

So if the lights go out, you know why.

    One more thing

Posted August 17, 2008 at 12:19 EDT under site announcements.

Please be aware that the Eco-Monkey World Domination Inc. executive team will be temporarily relocated to our West African offices for the next three weeks, starting August 22^nd. The intention is to scout out new investment opportunities in and around Accra, Kumasi and the resort areas in the lower Volta region of Ghana.

This means that the home office has been left in the capable hands of Entropy and an ill-fed and sexually dangerous pit-bull. In the unlikely event that one or more of the hosted Eco-Monkey services becomes unavailable during this time, our advice is to get outside and enjoy the nice weather we've been having. We will delete complaints upon our return mid-September.

To contact the Eco-Monkey executive team in case of a real emergency, please see the About page. This pretty much means email only, as we tend to move fast and use disposable phones that are hard to track.

Thank you for your time and attention.

    3-minute warning!

Posted July 30, 2008 at 06:42 EDT under site announcements. Updated July 30, 2008 at 07:48 EDT.

I'm picking up a kernel change which will require a full system reboot. All hosted Eco-Monkey sites will be affected.

The reboot will occur within the hour.

C'est fini. L'actualiser est complet. Mon français est merde.

    Notification of scheduled downtime

Posted April 26, 2008 at 01:59 EDT under site announcements. Updated June 16, 2008 at 10:39 EDT.

Upgrading to OpenBSD 4.3 soon. Details here.

[Read the rest...]

    My edge box is cooler than your edge box (in degrees Celcius, anyway)

Posted April 16, 2008 at 07:57 EDT under site announcements.

OpenBSD 4.3 and a nice Puffy t-shirt arrived at the Eco-Monkey World Domination Inc. Data Centre today.

This is reminder that it is that time of year again: total system upgrade time. Expect some scheduled and unscheduled downtime to all Eco-Monkey hosted services over the coming weekend.

So, put that OpenBSD release song library on repeat, boot from that CD and get installing!

The freedom of the world depends on it. Plus, you get some nice stickers.

    Time to go on a little diet

Posted March 12, 2008 at 09:36 EDT under site announcements.

In an effort to place the main blog page on a bit of a diet, I'm considering having the bulk of all future articles below the fold, keeping the primary part of each entry for a brief synopsis or introduction.

Since it looks like most regular readers just read this stuff through an RSS aggregator, I think most people will continue to see the whole thing since the RSS feed for this site includes a link to the entire article.

[Read the rest...]

    Notice of service interruption

Posted March 1, 2008 at 08:06 EST under site announcements. Updated March 2, 2008 at 09:29 EST.

While I tinker with the site let's all look at an image of the earth from space:

Image borrowed from the internet. Google helped me do it.

Crypto-Technogeek culture informs the following comment.

[Read the rest...]

    Upgrading system to OpenBSD 4.2

Posted January 19, 2008 at 10:26 EST under site announcements. Updated January 28, 2008 at 06:44 EST.

[The planned upgrade included some random pf hacking on the part of the administrator which caused TCP connections originating from outside the firewall to spin forever. Stupid administrator.]

[The planned upgrade is complete.]

[The planned upgrade is happening in 15 minutes.]

Please note:

I will be taking time to upgrade this server from OpenBSD 4.1 to 4.2, probably this week-end. This means that there will be service interruptions to the various and sundry services hosted by clevermonkey.org.

It also kills the 94+ day uptime I've accrued. Oh well. This also means we have not had a power outage in at least 94 days. Neat!

This upgrade will pick up some security fixes and general enhancements. I'm also hoping it solves the spontaneous spamd crashes that are occasionally delaying mail sent to @clevermonkey.org.

That is all.

    This is why I am a coder, and not a surgeon

Posted July 19, 2007 at 11:25 EDT under site announcements.

So, with all the excitement that has been going on around here, I sort of thoughtlessly upgraded PHP, Apache, MySQL and all those other fancy-pants words that make this site go. And I did so without really knowing what the effect this might have on the poor blog software that is presenting these words to you right now.

Of course, I totally b0rked everything.

So I did what any developer who routinely works on enterprise-level software would do: I fucking hacked at it until it worked.

Oh sure. I sort of guessed that it had something to do with register_globals (or, the lack thereof). I really just had to fire up vi and plug in the superglobals and things mostly worked. A few other tweaks, a jaunty little song about eating _COOKIEs, and all was well.

I'm not kidding about the song, either. You can ask ecogrrl about it if you want.

It occurs to me that this is probably exactly why I am a coder and not a surgeon.

I think all the blog stuff works now, including the RSS feed I busted.

    If you can read this, you probably have a cached copy

Posted July 14, 2007 at 11:25 EDT under site announcements. Updated July 16, 2007 at 06:08 EDT.

I am about to seriously fuck with this site.

How seriously? I'm about to screw around with acronyms and daemons and other processes that end in the letter d. That seriously.

You have been warned.

. . .

Things are mostly back into place again. There are probably some dark corners I've forgotten to sweep out, but for now this is Good Enough.

. . .

All hosted services will, again, be unavailable for some scheduled downtime.

. . .

Back up, running fully patched OpenBSD 4.1. The world is right again.

    If you can read this, you lucked out.

Posted May 11, 2007 at 08:03 EDT under site announcements. Updated May 11, 2007 at 08:12 EDT.

In a fit of pique I decided to tear most of the cruft out of this site. I threw in an homage to an industrial design favourite of mine, just as a bonus.

But, everything is still broken. Specifically, the RSS feed, direct links to blog entries and internal refs to existing blog entries will get you a 404.

Normally, I have all sorts of respect for the Apache web server and mod_rewrite, but today it sucks. Moving content from one directory to another is sort of the most trivial thing mod_rewrite can be expected to do. Apparently not.

I'll be tearing select chunks out of the sidebar over the next few weeks, possibly to make room for replacement widgets. We will see.

One magic peanut for the first person to tell us what the new page header is an homage to.

. . .

Apparently, I fixed it. You need to tell the rewrite engine this is a permanent redirection.

    If you can read this, it worked.

Posted January 17, 2007 at 08:38 EST under site announcements.

I consider the fact that this particular node on the InterTubes was only down for 24 hours a big win.

The OpenBSD edge box that powers clevermonkey.org and other related sites that are part of the Eco-Monkey World Domination conglomerate was finally upgraded to 4.0. The old 3.1 box was getting a bit long in the tooth, and for some reason 23 or my ISP were not getting along with regards to HTTP POST requests over 8KB.

Translation: I couldn't upload photos to my photosite. Probably not coincidentally, Flickr works fine now as well. Expect lots of new photos to be published over the next few weeks. I'm even looking into micropayment stock photography, mostly at the behest of ecogrrl.

Otherwise, the casual visitor should not notice anything different around here. I'm lazy enough that most services are still being offered by the old box running in parallel through the magic of packet redirection (OpenBSD PF, I love you, man!) As we move stuff over to the shiny new black box expect some unscheduled downtime and strange behaviour. Strange behaviour might include better performance or monkeys flying out of your media drive slot. Anything could happen. Don't we live in interesting times?

And changes are coming. Expect massive improvements to the entire site as we upgrade all the sites and services to make your eco/monkey experience better. Well, better for us, anyway.

Yes, this means the Eco/Monkey Quiki-Wiki will be revamped, as well as various blogs and forums so many of you have used in the past.

Oh, you wanted a time-table for this work? Very funny.

Anyway, if something is broken, please let me know.

    eco-monkey forum, redux

Posted August 13, 2006 at 09:59 EDT under site announcements.

Since ecogrrl is back in Ghana for a little while, I thought it might be appropriate to fire up the eco-monkey forum again. Since our well-hacked blog software does not allow for commenting, the forum is pretty much the only way to respond to individual blog postings. (As an aside, there are vague machinations going on to get the Eco-Monkey Quiki-Wiki out of beta, but this will require the sort of server mojo we shouldn't talk about here.)

There was a fair amount of dialogue in response to her semi-regular travel notes on the last trip, and there is no reason not to encourage the same for this trip.

Feel free to drop by and leave us a message to say hello or to comment on a blog entry.

I also hooked ecogrrl up with a swanky RSS link for her blog so all you feed-burners out there can get your freak on.

    A small improvement

Posted August 13, 2006 at 01:29 EDT under site announcements.

I slightly hacked the RSS feed for this blog such that it only provides a summary of up to two full paragraphs instead of dumping the entire article contents into the output. And this time I do it so it doesn't totally break the markup.

Image courtesy Wikipedia

I guess you should only care if your RSS reader (I use Vienna, though many browsers do RSS natively now) or service (i.e., Bloglines) chokes on the changes I made.

    Never meddle in the affairs of databases, for they are subtle and quick to anger

Posted March 22, 2006 at 10:53 EST under site announcements.

From the oops-I-did-it-again dept.:

Well, at least the database startup failure that broke the blog this morning didn't leak all kinds of debugging details to the world.

I mean, I did have a variety of debugging settings in the php.ini and my.cnf files for testing out some neat new toys. All of that was pulled out just before I rebooted last evening.

In this particular case I had tweaked some InnoDB logfile sizes, which is (apparently) verboten once those logs have been created. The irony is that I don't think I'm actually running InnoDB databases or tables.

The major reason for all the unscheduled downtime most of last evening is that I'm testing the new edge box. I have not quite migrated the web stuff over, which will be a challenge because a lot of the tech has changed in the years since OpenBSD 3.1.

• Apache is now running in a chroot environment and has been upgraded to 1.3.29
• PHP has been upgraded to 5.x
• MySQL has been upgraded to 4.x
• A bunch of things I'm sure I have not accounted for have changed, as well

The testing went reasonably well (other than the unnecessary change to the production box that broke everything) except that I am unable to get the fancy new kernel-space PPPoE interface to route properly. However, once I got a connection and route setup with the user-land PPPoE stuff, it looks like all the services that depend on that are all setup nicely.

For those of you following along at home, this includes named, and I suck at configuring named. It doesn't help that OpenBSD has it's own very special way of organizing BIND 9 config files so I can't just directly use, say, the O'Reilly DNS and BIND book as a reference.

I actually have to think about what I'm doing, and I hate having to do that.

On the very good side, this new box is fast. It never swaps. It's quiet. It makes less heat. It has less stickers on it. These are all good things (except maybe for the stickers).

I'm feeling rather pleased with myself that I am all ready for a painless upgrade to OpenBSD 3.9 when it is released, and have pre-ordered my CD set and t-shirt.

I usually only get a CD set once every 3-4 releases (well, astute readers will note that I only fully upgrade once every 6-7 releases, anyway), but I when I read this comment from marco@ I decided to chip in and buy my own copy again. While I'm not a complete deadbeat (I usually borrow the CD set from work because our IT team buys OpenBSD every 6 months) I'd hate for this project to just disappear.

So, I suggest you order a CD set and t-shirt, as well. They make great gifts for children, and will provide months of secure and sticker-friendly fun for the entire family.

    Up and down like a two-dollar euphemism

Posted January 13, 2006 at 07:35 EST under site announcements.

Apparently, it is possible for ADSL modems to wear out and stop working.

At least, this is the conclusion I've reached after inspecting my network and chatting with my ADSL provider. If you can read this particular entry on our about the time I posted it, it means that the ADSL modem I borrowed (which, coincidentally, is exactly the same model as the one that went signals-up) is still working.

This doesn't really surprise me, as these devices are filled with passive components that can dry up or wear out in very subtle ways.

Anyway, this explains why all those incredibly important services hosted at this location were unavailable for most of this week. Sorry about that.

A positive result of this whole thing is that I figured out who my DSL provider is (not an easy task, given how often these little companies are bought and sold) and determined that their support crew, indeed, know their asses from a hole in the ground. I also found out that they upgraded me to 3mbit/sec service.

So, I have a tentative plan with Zuckervati tomorrow to go and dig up a nice ADSL2, Annex L device.

I hope to be surfing pr0n in style by this time tomorrow. W00t!