The Newbsoft Network

Forums all Fucked Up [RESOLVED]

2010-02-13T22:34:00.001-08:00

UPDATE: Everything should be back to normal.

Original post:

I'm aware of the current issues logging into and using the phpbb3 forums on the server. This appears to apply to all of them.

Looks like there's some kind of time descrepancy happening, where the server thinks it's March 23rd, 2154. This is being addressed, and I hope to have it fixed soon.

The 2010 Donation Drive!

2009-12-22T13:26:00.001-08:00

UPDATE: Well, that was fast! Thanks to all of you who donated! Looks like we've got 2 more years of service squared away. You can still donate, if you like. The same rules apply: all donations will go straight to the server costs and domain registrations -- so donations past the original amount will extend the life of the server far into the future, past the end of the world even, if you believe in bullshit Mayan calendar myths! Yay!

Original Post:

Our server bills come due in July, which is plenty of time for us to raise the money to pay for the next 2 years of hosting. We've got a nice little community of folks who probably don't even know that the others exist, but for a couple months maybe we can celebrate the ways we're connected... namely through the kindness of yours truly! :)

If you wanna give a couple bucks, that'll be just fine. If not, that's cool too. Regardless, I'll keep hosting sites for as long as I own the server space, so no need to worry. Thanks for thinking about it!

Here's the URL you can use to donate via ChipIn (which uses PayPal, so it's secure). All donations will be used to pay hosting and domain registration bills.

Running Great!

2009-06-26T07:46:00.001-07:00

Everything's running great right now. Just thought I'd update the server status page!

Load Issues Today

2009-02-23T14:30:00.000-08:00

We're experiencing a bit of a heavy load this afternoon. My apologies. I'm working on it! :)

Busy Server

2009-01-12T05:21:00.000-08:00

As with all Dresden Codak updates, we're experiencing a bit of a heavy load on the server as folks talk about the new comic on the KW forums. I've increased the available CPU and RAM which should help ease the burden a little.

Load Issues Conquered?

2008-09-01T08:21:00.000-07:00

Here's the deal. Basically when I first created the php comic script Walrus, I coded in some bits that check for a "current version" image file on my server. Cut to 7 years later, some larger webcomics still use that old code, and at times my server gets nailed by hundreds of those requests all at the same time -- My suspicion is there's a web aggregator trolling those pages, but since there's nothing I can do to stop the requests from happening in the first place, I finally came up with a genius plan to divert them so the Newbsoft Server never even has to refuse the connection (which is what was happening for the past few years).

The gist of it is, now any time a request is made to either walrusphp.com or lifeofwily.com (the script's original home), it is first diverted to a google-hosted blog, at the domain level. Then real folks have the opportunity to click and continue on to their destination, and web aggregators get to leave me the fuck alone.

We're still running a little above the usual load, but I think that has to do with the Mafia.

I can't promise this has solved all our problems, but I've been monitoring the load very closely over the past couple days, and it seems like maybe we've got things handled.

At least for now!

Working on it!

2008-08-28T14:22:00.001-07:00

Yeah, we're being hit by an extremely large number of page requests at the moment. I'm working to fix it now. :)

Load Issues Update 2

2008-08-17T10:46:00.000-07:00

It appears the cause of the load issues was a faulty router, detailed here. Things seem to be working just fine again, and server loads is running at well below capacity.

Load Issues Update

2008-08-16T06:02:00.000-07:00

The server has been experiencing some sporadic load issues over the past 24 hours or so. Things seem to have leveled out, but I'll keep a close eye on it for the next few days.

Scheduled Dreamhost Downtime

2008-06-18T21:25:00.000-07:00

On July 11th, starting at 10pm PST, all dreamhost servers, including Newbsoft, will be going down for a couple hours.

Problems Resolved

2008-06-05T15:34:00.001-07:00

Everything seems to be running smoothly, and has been for about 12 hours.

Major Dreamhost Network Outages

2008-06-04T15:23:00.000-07:00

The server is experiencing a bit of a heavy load, which is causing some errors. Looks like there has been a major network outage for Dreamhost. Unfortunately this means there's nothing I can do about it on this end:

It would appear that someone in one of our data centers wrongfully turned off one of our circuit breakers. This caused a bunch of central machines to shut down as well as one of our network distribution switches. Once this was noticed, our admin team sprung into action to take care of this. Our services should be coming back online now and we’ll update this post one last time when things have leveled back out.

Read more here.

The problems should be resolved very shortly.

Server Back Online

2008-05-16T08:51:00.000-07:00

There was a problem with the apache service. It's back up and running now. I'll keep an eye on the server load for the next few hours to make sure we're back at full capacity.

Update

2008-05-16T08:47:00.003-07:00

The entire server is currently down. I don't have an explanation yet.

Heavy Usage this morning

2008-05-16T07:11:00.000-07:00

I'm looking into it.