Lost Province Productions

September Newsletter, Part Deux

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 20:34:00 GMT

We're back! (again)

(the oops edition)

Several of you noticed that embarrassing lack of service last week. We've never been down that long before, and so I can no longer say "We've never been down that long before." On the bright side, I can now say "Well, it's not been down as long as we were in September '10!" For those of you who slept through it, the server was unresponsive for more than 12 hours (fortunately, most of that was overnight.

Email, is something, as the song says, that you don't know what you've got till its gone. Unfortunately, it was gone for me, too: my mail and control panel was unresponsive, and as soon as I found out there was a problem, I called Tech Support. Contrary to popular opinion, I do step away from the computer occasionally, and so there was a bit of a lag. In light of this, I want to give you all an alternate email for me, in case there seems to be a problem: ric.kolseth@gmail.com . Of course, feel free to call me at 336.977.9015 also, if the site is down, or you need a jump this winter (may require an additional fee ;-).

I registered lostprovince.net in March of 2002; and previously was providing design work as lostprovince.com since 1996, so I have websites older than some of my children! I hope you will agree, one day out of 2,920 isn't too shabby.

I use Verio as my connectivity provider: one of the Big Boys. Their equipment and tech support is top-notch, and is not based overseas. I'm reasonably sure that we won't be hearing that a mouse chewed through some wires or someone kicked a plug loose. The fact that it is taking a while to get an answer to this means that it's something they haven't run into before, or is very rare. We're not doing anything exotic or groundbreaking on our sites (aside from their excellent design, that is ;-) so it's probably not our fault.

One other thing: Last newsletter, I mentioned the upgrade to the mail system. This is still waiting on clearing a few large inboxes so I can be sure nothing crucial will get lost. Once this is done, the response when you go to
"http://yourdomain.com/ControlPanel" should be "snappier" as the server won't have to unpack the entire 40MB or 80MB (or 100MB) of email.

Glitches do happen, however, and there have been a few aftershocks, but I am watching this situation very closely. Tech support is still researching this one, and I am staying on their backs to find out what went wrong and how to prevent it. When I know something substantive, I'll let you know too. Thanks for your patience!

PS: Just got this as of press time:

Thank you for contacting viaVerio Web Hosting Customer Care. You contacted us regarding CPX/system very slow.

I apologize for any inconvenience you might have experienced with this issue.

There was a hardware issue last night. The RAID cards were swapped and the drives need to rebuild the information. This is causing the drives to run slowly, that is affecting the whole server and accounts. This maintenance should be done tonight. If you still notice slowness tomorrow, please let us know.

Well, they did say there was a hardware issue... but it's not very informative, and doesn't address what happened last week. *Sigh*... I'll keep pestering them.

Happy computing: ain't technology grand? Except when it isn't.

-- Your Webguy, Ric Kolseth

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LPP Newsletter: 9/2010

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 18:04:00 GMT

Hello!

I'd like to start communicating more with you; to this end, I'm going to be sending out a periodic email newsletter: it will be short and sweet, and you can trash it if you want to. If you don't really want to get it at all, that's OK too, but as a customer/client/friend I've got your email anyway ;-) (Just so you know, I attempt to use humor from time to time.)

Now: about emails: I wanted to let you know about an improvement I'm making in how email are handled. I'm telling you, because probably you won't notice, and I have to blow my own horn, but here goes: I'm changing the server to use Maildir and not MBOX by vinstalling Dovecote.

There! I said it and I'm glad. But seriously, how this benefits you is that mail will get processed a bit faster. With the old method, all your email messages were kept on the server in one big ball, and when your mail program wanted to do something with it, it would have to open up that (sometimes huge! - you know who you are ;-) file, change something in it, and save it, and that could take a while, if you've not remembered to empty your trash in a while.

I'm going to make this installation on an off-hour: there should be no sign for it on your end. The documentation assures me that there should be nothing aside from a very little downtime -minutes- where the server might not process mail. You won't need to change any of your settings on your own email programs.

That's it for now! Thought I'd keep this first message short and sweet. If you have any questions, feel free to reply to this message, and I'll try to answer them.

-- Your Webguy, Ric Kolseth

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September Newsletter

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 17:45:00 GMT

Hello!

That's it for now! Thought I'd keep this first message short and sweet. If you have any questions, feel free to reply to this message, and I'll try to answer them.

-- Your Webguy, Ric

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The Hillbilly Geek Message

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:04:00 GMT

my test

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