eagles-lair.org
eagles-lair.dyndns.org

welcome to my website's advisory page

Advisories are a technical term meaning that visitors are advised in advance that something is going to happen.

A good example is scheduled downtime.

You may well ask "What about when something goes down, or gets 'broken'?"

Well, that is harder to advise if the server itself goes down.

So, as this server here at www.eagles-lair.org is really quite rock solid, this would be a good place, imho, to place advisories about the number of small vhosts - virtual hosts - I serve from home.

And of course the IRC channel logging, and the chat control bot called isaiah40. And my own personal presence there, too.

So, here we are, and I've grabbed a few minutes after getting something done to my "dead" machine that crashed Sunday night, Australian time, 14th August 2005.

Advisories Section

14th August 2005
Kestrel, an IBM Aptiva running Apache 1.3.29 on MS Windows2000 decided that its HDD wasn't need any more, and appears to have shredded its data storage, and reduced in size to zero.

18th August 2005
A new "Kestrel", an HP Vectra running Apache 1.3.31 on MS Windows2000, has been put back into service; for the last 24 hours it has been serving a single "placeholder" page on each virtual host. This appears to be running well, so a new data HDD has been built and installed, comprising all the vhosts backups up until about two months ago.

While the chatroom logging directories are there, there are no logs in them. They are lost, forever. There is a limit to how much backing up one can do. At this stage the bots are not back on the machine. That will probably take a day or two.

22nd August 2005
We believe that everything is back up and running correctly, although all IRC logs have been lost with no opportunity to recover them. Maybe that shows how unimportant logs really are, lol !

24th August 2005
My ISP advises that for a few minutes duration sometime during the week 29th August - 2nd September, my home services will be down. Excerpt from their email text follows...

This email is to inform you that your ADSL service will be migrated to an Agile DSLAM port on your phone number starting on 29/08/2005 and ending on 02/09/2005. Migrations will occur Monday to Friday between 8am and 7pm and may take Telstra a couple of weeks to complete. Customers will experience a loss of dial tone and Internet access for a few minutes while their line is physically cutover. Should either dial tone or your ADSL access not resume within 30 minutes please contact Internode Support.

At the conclusion of this work, my service will be an ADSL2 with a theoretical download of 12 Megabits/second and a theoretical upload speed of about one fifth of that - which will be adequate for serving webpages :)

3rd September 2005
While one can smile at such a huge connection rate of 12Mb/sec, because it is modified by the resistance of the copper cable, and how much of it there is, internal cabling within the village and its distribution pillars, house wiring, and none the least the inability of the "old" ADSL modem to handle the higher speed, the cut-over is now fully behind us, and an interesting display of up and down transfers speeds can be seen here.

19th September 2008: Internode Advisory #5691
An extensive downtime has been experienced on my internet service provider's account, email and web server systems, which is now into its second day and seen here. Most has been restored effective the night of 19th/20th, but Internode's email is still down - both POP mail and webmail, and this includes aliassed email addresses pointing towards internode.on.net (which my chatministries addresses are) - so don't expect any reply any time soon :) Their engineers have worked through the night and we are now into the weekend... they are pedalling as fast as they can, doing a great job. Patience is a virtue lol :)

20th September 2008 Internode Advisory #5693
Overnight 19th-20th September, the DSLAM ADSL equipment owned by Agile (the sister company to my ISP), and located at my local phone exchange (Modbury in Adelaide's NE burbs), had a one hour outage just after midnight at the start of the day. Because I was asleep, my IRC channel control bots timed out and had to be manually restarted some six hours later when I woke. Look here.

Take care :)
Richard.