Crazy last weekend
Feb. 9th, 2007 02:37 pmWell, I guess I should write up last weekend, since it was pretty wild.
It started off pretty well. On Friday evening, I got a call from Kasi Frost. It turned out that she was going to be in the area on business, so we got together in the evening. I was introduced to vodka sours and The Yakety Day After. I introduced her to The Angry Nintendo Nerd.
On Saturday, I decided to upgrade the Drupal instance that was serving up my website, the Save Ardmore website, and the PA-Furry website (currently under renovation, so I won't link to it quite yet). Well, that turned out to be interesting, because my web host uses a reverse proxy to cache webpages, and Drupal 4.7 didn't play too nicely with that. In addition to seeing all sorts of stale (cached) pages, I was also seeing pages from the wrong site displayed!
After a day of fighting with Drupal, I finally split the websites onto three different servers and that put an end to the proxy issues. But then, as things started to stabilize, my web host began experiencing some routing problems on Tuesday. It wasn't their fault, or even their ISP's fault. It was UUNet/AlterNet who managed to bork things up on their backbone. Performing a traceroute to my web provider would show my packets only made it about 80% of the way before getting dropped. When they did a traceroute to my gateway, their packets only made it about halfway before getting dropped by a UUNet router in Chicago. That persisted for about 2 days until UUNet fixed things.
One good thing came out of this, though. Due to the intermittent availability, the number of broken search engines trying to load mangled URLs from my site has slowed down considerably, thus lowing my traffic and my costs.
And this new weekend is almost upon us. Let's see if I can do just a little better than last. ;-)
It started off pretty well. On Friday evening, I got a call from Kasi Frost. It turned out that she was going to be in the area on business, so we got together in the evening. I was introduced to vodka sours and The Yakety Day After. I introduced her to The Angry Nintendo Nerd.
On Saturday, I decided to upgrade the Drupal instance that was serving up my website, the Save Ardmore website, and the PA-Furry website (currently under renovation, so I won't link to it quite yet). Well, that turned out to be interesting, because my web host uses a reverse proxy to cache webpages, and Drupal 4.7 didn't play too nicely with that. In addition to seeing all sorts of stale (cached) pages, I was also seeing pages from the wrong site displayed!
After a day of fighting with Drupal, I finally split the websites onto three different servers and that put an end to the proxy issues. But then, as things started to stabilize, my web host began experiencing some routing problems on Tuesday. It wasn't their fault, or even their ISP's fault. It was UUNet/AlterNet who managed to bork things up on their backbone. Performing a traceroute to my web provider would show my packets only made it about 80% of the way before getting dropped. When they did a traceroute to my gateway, their packets only made it about halfway before getting dropped by a UUNet router in Chicago. That persisted for about 2 days until UUNet fixed things.
One good thing came out of this, though. Due to the intermittent availability, the number of broken search engines trying to load mangled URLs from my site has slowed down considerably, thus lowing my traffic and my costs.
And this new weekend is almost upon us. Let's see if I can do just a little better than last. ;-)