Explosion shuts down The Planet/Hostgator dedicated servers

On Saturday at about 4:45pm, a major power transformer in the one of the Houston data centers exploded knocking down three walls and causing a large fire. Power was disrupted and technicians were unable to do anything until approval from the fire marshal was granted. It took over 24 hours for this approval.

The good news was that none of the hardware (servers, routers, etc) were harmed. No one lost any data, but since backup power was not allowed, the network went down and many of Hostgator’s dedicated servers went offline. Mine included. This is a fluke event and unpredictable by anyone. No one to blame except fate.

Early this morning the folks at both The Planet and Hostgator have managed to get 90% of everyone back online. Sorry for the downtime. I’ve still been noticing some lag and issues with my email. Obviously the support staff is swamped with irate customers and trying to get things back online. Hopefully everything will return to a normal plateau shortly. Thanks for your patience.

If you want to read more visit: read more »

• The forum at Hostgator
• The server status report from The Planet

New Goober Server

Goobertech is on a new server (and all the other goober-sites, too). Now there’s twice as much space and twice as much speed. There shouldn’t be anymore lags in load time and no more damn MySQL timeout errors. Woohoo.

When it rains it pours...

Jebus H Christ! What a fucking nightmare!

Here I sit for over a half hour listening to the goddamn Comcast muzak waiting for the human to answer. Did I mention how much I hate Comcast? And not only because they’ve a complete monopoly on DSL service in the Twin Cities.

This all started because I’ve been busy upgrading everyone’s sites from Drupal 4.6 or 4.7 to Drupal 5.X. And we all get a fancy and shiny new look to go with it. As I’m doing one site full of events, I notice that even though MySQL is storing the correct timestamp, Drupal isn’t displaying it correctly. A week ago, this kept me up all night trying to figure it out.

Then I learn the issue is really a bug in the way php 4.0.1 (which is what was on my server) dealt with the date() function. Soon I realize that I can’t use any of the fancy new php 5 functions either because my server software is woefully out of date. Even online forums were nearly useless, because they’re all discussing php 5 as well. read more »

Hard server reboot

Sorry folks - all goobersites went offline for about fifteen minutes between 3:50 and 4:05 pm CST while the server was being rebooted. Goobertech was being especially slow and now things are back to normal. Sorry for any trouble.

Goobertech gets a kick in the ass.

Things have been kinda pokey around here lately. So I’ve done a few things to speed it up.

• The pages are now cached per session. This means images already viewed will be faster. You can always over-ride this manually by deleting your browsers cache. Otherwise it will happen automatically every hour.
• The various drupal css sheets are now conglomerated with java. Instead of multiple server draws to load each style sheet, the latest Drupal can splice them all together and make just one server call. This alone should make the largest difference.
• Background images are once again prettified and reduced to load faster.
• Not speed related — but pixel problems have been rectified. No one will probably even notice anything here, but a lot of little issues that have been bugging me have been fixed. Namely the task link positions at the end of each entry and various gallery function pages.

I’m not even going to bother looking at how Internet Explorer mucks things up now. If you still using that sorry browser it’s your own damn fault. Get with it and join the rest of the intelligent world with Firefox.