Meet you back here in half an hour.
What are you going to do?
What I always do - stay out of trouble... Badly.
Sunday, March 29
Sorry About The Site Glitches
Our statistics database filled up. This wasn't immediately obvious from the logs, and since it was due to a size limit being set too low rather than running out of server resources, it wasn't obvious from the state of the server.
It's been addressed now, the server processes have been restarted to clean up any hung connections, and all should be well with the world.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:40 AM
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1
Should I notify you of the "Bad Gateway 502" error I just got a few seconds ago, which went away when I clicked refresh?
Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, March 29 2015 11:15 AM (jGQR+)
2
Actually, yes. That reminded me that I'd put in a patch to try to resolve the problem and needed to take it back out, because it's probably un-helping now that we're stable again.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 29 2015 11:30 AM (PiXy!)
3
I was only getting 500 errors.
Also, wasn't there some policy of auto-closing the comments on posts over a certain age? Some spammer just picked one of Brickmuppet's year-old posts. (Is there a name for spam that pretends very well to be a person?)
Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, March 29 2015 11:34 AM (TJ7ih)
4
As a rule of thumb, if the site glitches enough that you notice, please let me know.
There's always some sort of crap going on on the internet, but if you have to hit refresh more often on mee.nu than, say, amazon.com, I should be able to fix that. They have a lot more resources than I do, but they have to do a lot more as well. Should even out.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 29 2015 11:37 AM (PiXy!)
5
Mauser, yeah, on the 500 errors, it depended on when you saw it; you either got a 500 error from the blogging software, or a 502 error from the server because the blogging software was doing an automatic restart.
And yes, I'll check on the comment-closing feature and get that fixed up. That's a useful spam trap as well - I track IPs that comment on closed posts and blacklist them
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 29 2015 11:41 AM (PiXy!)
6
Pixy, new posts are now defaulting to "comments disabled".
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, March 30 2015 09:52 AM (+rSRq)
7
Oops! Sorry, I'll get that fixed ASAP.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 30 2015 04:14 PM (PiXy!)
8
Fixed now. There's a "template" post containing the default settings for newly created posts; when I closed the historical posts to slow down the stream of spam, I accidentally closed the template post as well, and the default for comments switched from on to off.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 30 2015 07:14 PM (PiXy!)
9
Sorry to bother you, but Brickmuppet is being spammed again.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, March 30 2015 11:30 PM (+rSRq)
10
Opened a fresh can of Spam-B-Gone.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 31 2015 04:17 PM (PiXy!)
11
I've never quite understood the statistics produced. The numbers get very large compared to the apparent traffic.
Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, April 01 2015 11:14 PM (TJ7ih)
12
I'm going to do something to break it down. More than half our traffic seems to be webcrawlers - Google, Bing, sites like that.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, April 01 2015 11:48 PM (PiXy!)
13
Greate pieces. Keep posting such kind of information on your site.
Im really impressed by your site.
Hello there, You've performed a great job. I will certainly digg it and personally recommend
to my friends. I am sure they will be benefited from this site.
Posted by: forskolin weight loss where to buy at Friday, May 22 2015 12:15 PM (3/rcv)
14
Wow. This comment section is exactly what I am looking for. Come check out my website so I can download a worm onto yours. HAHahaha. BTW - some spam is getting through... :-)
Posted by: kurt duncan at Friday, May 29 2015 07:48 AM (QKmzp)
15
I am sure this post has touched all the internet visitors, its really really
pleasant post on building up new webpage.
Posted by: ke toan at Tuesday, June 02 2015 03:06 PM (9urXA)
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Thursday, May 15
Spam Spam Spam Spam
One of our spam filters wasn't working due to a network configuration error. Hence, spam. Lots of spam. Spamlots of spam.
Should improve now. There's still a DNS hiccup that I'm waiting to correct itself, but I can't hurry that along.
Update: DNS hiccup should be fixed now. Double-fixed soon.
Update: There we go, double-fixed.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
04:20 PM
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.... SWG is still down, sir...... as is the mail send and receive function.... is this a DNS issue as well?...... sorry for all the trouble.... I wish that I were there to help... or at least to make the coffee/margaritas!....
Posted by: Eric at Thursday, May 15 2014 10:57 PM (d7gLI)
2
Sorry about that Eric! Your blog is up now; I'll get your email sorted out ASAP.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, May 15 2014 11:14 PM (PiXy!)
3
.... any word on the DNS updates, sir?...... still can't get to my .com or the .com mail server to send and/or receive......
.... good luck with all the updates!... .
Eric
Posted by: Eric at Friday, May 30 2014 12:02 AM (d7gLI)
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Wednesday, May 14
It's Alive!!!
Sorry about the outage. We got hit by a meteorite and reduced to our component atoms. It's taken us this long to reassemble into functional molecules.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:03 PM
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Saturday, March 08
Licensed To UI
For about a year, I've been looking for themes to license for mee.nu. I need a blog theme and a control panel theme*, and I need them to be clean, easily integrated, and based on a robust framework Bootstrap rather than some random assemblage of PSDs.
Themes like this are readily available and typically cost $10-$20... Per web site. Extended licenses for developers run into hundreds or thousands of dollars. About this time last year, I found a blog theme that I was pretty happy with, and then, before I could actually buy the extended license needed, the store selling it change their license terms so that I couldn't use it anyway.**
Anyway, last year was kind of a mess and little progress was made. Last week I was poking around the theme stores again, and I found this little puppy:
Nice, clean, simple design. It had only been out a couple of weeks and had already had an update adding new features. It had the double menubar I need (so that I can have a mee.nu menu and a site menu), and a good selection of page templates.
And it cost $100. For the extended license. The one I'd been looking at last year was $850; others have been well over $1000.
It will take a while to transmogrify it into the new mee.nu theme, but right now my version looks something like this:
I still needed a control panel theme. Again, there's no shortage of these, but they cost $500 and up. Sometimes very up. Except on the same day I found one called
Lanceng. which wasn't quite what I was after and would take some work to tidy up (it's a bit noisy, visually), but was $50 for the extended license:
So I was set. And then, last night, I found
SpaceLab, visually clean and $100 for the extended license:
Now I'm set. I just need to smoosh them all together somehow...
* And maybe some others, but that's the basics.
** They originally had a clause specifically allowing online services like mee.nu. They replaced it with a clause specifically disallowing online services like mee.nu. There's a loophole in the new terms that I could wriggle through, but I'm not interested in going there.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:21 PM
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If you want to use The Pond as a testbed... average user, decent number of visitors, etc... let me know!
Posted by: Wonderduck at Monday, March 10 2014 10:26 PM (OLSt7)
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Tuesday, February 04
Meegrating
I'm planning to move mee.nu across to a new server next weekend. I'll post details in the next couple of days, but be prepared for some site wonkiness in the small hours of Sunday morning. (Which is Sunday afternoon for me in Australia, so it works well for most of us.)
New server is cheaper and faster (for most things), has more memory, and a lot more SSD. Only has software RAID, but it's RAID-1, which is pretty reliable, and with the new config we have a separate dedicated backup server.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
01:51 PM
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Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, February 10 2014 07:31 AM (+rSRq)
2
Not yet, had to reschedule for tomorrow.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, February 10 2014 08:01 AM (2yngH)
3
I noticed we were offline for about half an hour this morning, so I assume it happened? How's the new server doing?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, February 11 2014 11:23 AM (+rSRq)
4
Sorry, that must have been a glitch. Still not meegrated.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, February 12 2014 11:19 AM (PiXy!)
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Sunday, February 02
Oops
Overrun by log files.
Fixed now.
Sorry.
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09:38 AM
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Friday, January 03
NSFW SWF
NSFW below the fold.
more...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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1
I'm confused by your acronyms.
...
...
I need to ponder this for a bit.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Friday, January 03 2014 11:45 AM (DnAJl)
2
Which part confused you, kid?
Posted by: RickC at Saturday, January 04 2014 10:29 AM (swpgw)
3
Pixy: aside: In IE11 (in edge mode by default) when I commented, after the page reloaded, the top was Brickmuppet's comment; I couldn't scroll above. This seems like some weird version of the bug that used to show up in Wonderduck's anime reviews, where you couldn't scroll all the way down. I don't know if this is something you can fix or not.
Posted by: RickC at Saturday, January 04 2014 10:32 AM (swpgw)
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Monday, November 18
Ceci N'est Pas Une Post
Just testing, nothing to see...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Thursday, November 14
Quick Site Note 2
Load on the server is up with some more sites coming over to Minx; I've assigned more CPU resources to the application, and allocated more threads to the proxy. We're still peaking at only about 40% of server capacity (plus we have a spare server sitting idle right now), so this not an issue; I just needed to reconfigure the virtual machines to better allocate the hardware resources.
It looks like the proxy was the main problem - when it ran out of threads it would simply drop the HTTP connection. And I haven't updated the config in two years - the proxy had been running without interruption all that time.
Also, I've installed Redis for improved element caching; I'll bring that into production this weekend.
Update: Redis deployed! Works nicely. I was using in-process caching before, and with lazy key evictions and the increased number of worker processes, that was using up a fair bit of memory for a so-so hit rate. Redis works much better.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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1
Are we on the same server as Ace and the Jawas?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thursday, November 14 2013 04:41 PM (+rSRq)
2
The same physical server, yes. We were on different virtual servers, but Ace is now moving over to join us.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, November 14 2013 05:03 PM (PiXy!)
3
Thanks a lot, everything works great this morning.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Friday, November 15 2013 02:25 AM (RqRa5)
4
FWIW, I got mini-mega-spammed overnight. I saved an example for you, so you could do ugly things to it.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, November 17 2013 12:46 AM (Izt1u)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 17 2013 03:09 AM (PiXy!)
6
Yes. It junked itself, and I was hardly going to dejunkify it. It's under Edit > comments.
I surely don't mind if you dig around!
Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, November 17 2013 07:57 AM (Izt1u)
7
Did something change in how you're displaying the time stamps? Used to be they'd all render in my zone time, for me. But now they seem to be rendering in the owner's zone time. For instance, Wonderduck's time stamps are now all CST. (It was a bit strange leaving a comment there, and seeing the time stamp on my comment two hours in my future.) Your timestamps are all Sydney time.
Was that a deliberate change?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, November 17 2013 09:23 AM (+rSRq)
8
Huh. Comment timestamps should be in the blog's timezone, not the commenters'. And the recent changes shouldn't have affected that.
I'll take a look.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 17 2013 01:17 PM (PiXy!)
9
Wait. It sounds like it's working how it should. You mean, all the timestamps on my site are Sydney time, all those on Wonderduck's blog in CST, right?
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 17 2013 01:38 PM (PiXy!)
10
Yes, that's correct. I thought it used to render all the timestamps in the reader's time zone.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, November 17 2013 01:53 PM (+rSRq)
11
Testing caching, don't mind me...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 17 2013 03:54 PM (PiXy!)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 17 2013 03:54 PM (PiXy!)
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Saturday, November 09
Quick Site Note
I've enabled applet caching in Minx - what this means is that things like archive lists and recent comments might not update immediately, but will be cached for up to 60 seconds. This is a big speed improvement on large and busy sites, reducing page load times in one case from 1.8 seconds to 36 milliseconds.
It seems to be working well, but if you see anything odd, let me know.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
03:23 AM
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Alas, the spammers are back. (Go check out Wonderduck.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, November 09 2013 05:34 AM (+rSRq)
2
Zapped them. The spam filter is still glitching occasionally, and needs some care. It will be fixed by the end of November, I promise!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, November 09 2013 10:26 AM (PiXy!)
3
Sometimes today when I load my own page, some of the images don't load. Just now I tried it and the CSS file didn't load; the page was unformatted. I don't know if it's related to your caching change.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, November 11 2013 03:41 PM (+rSRq)
4
It certainly shouldn't do that; the change only affects a couple of specific things. But I'll take a look.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, November 11 2013 10:43 PM (PiXy!)
5
For some reason in IE11 on the main page, I'm not seeing the category icons next to post titles, but they do show up on the individual post pages.
Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 13 2013 11:54 AM (swpgw)
6
Huh...and now after posting that last comment, they're there.
Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 13 2013 11:55 AM (swpgw)
7
Lots and lots of "reset while loading" for a few days now. Seems like a DDoS, unless it's a misconfiguration, or hitting a duff server in a rotation.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Thursday, November 14 2013 02:07 PM (RqRa5)
8
I've seen a few of those too. I'll reset the server processes, and if that doesn't fix it, escalate appropriately. Or inappropriately.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, November 14 2013 02:47 PM (PiXy!)
9
Looks like load is up. I'll spin up some more back-end threads.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, November 14 2013 02:50 PM (PiXy!)
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