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Saturday, March 28th, 2009
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7:17 pm - service downtime
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dormando
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Hey folks,
I'll start this as I usually do - rydia's got pretty gosh darn good uptime overall. We deal with a couple hours a year at most, which is less than most services.
That said, it's time for our dormando-pulls-his-hair-out-because-he-can't-avoid-it outage of the year.
On monday night we will be moving the primary servers to a new colocation facility. The old facility appears to be having some economic difficulties and has decided to screw over most of their customers. I'll leave the facility unnamed ;) Rydia's been through tough times before, and we'll live through this. Our costs will go up slightly but we have no plans of deferring that to you folks.
The outage window is looking like 9pm to 11pm PDT, monday night (march 30th). That's two hours. As always we aim to complete the maintenance in less time, but expect service to be down for about two hours.
Thanks for using rydia ;)
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(comment on this)
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| Monday, May 26th, 2008
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12:41 am - Unplanned outage :(
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dormando
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Hey folks,
The datacenter rydia.net is located in is presently offline for reasons unknown to me. The facility staff is going to give me a phone call once there is an update to the situation.
E-mail will be spooling at our backup mail service in texas, so through the outage we should not be losing any e-mail.
Hopefully it's just a router/transit problem so your honorable sysadmin doesn't have to drive up to fremont in the middle of the night before a holiday :)
Update: aaaaaaaaaaaaand we're back! Sorry for any inconvenience :( Our datacenter apparently lost power, but thankfully all of the rydia.net machines came back up (mostly) on their own. So I saved myself a drive up there somehow, but will be having a stern talk with our DC folks next week.
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(13 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, March 3rd, 2008
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11:00 pm - maintenance
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dormando
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Yo,
We're down for a quick maintenance / upgrade. Once the disk check finishes on the primary webserver we should be up and rolling.
Apologies for the lack of notice; we really had to do this upgrade and now was the last chance I'll have for a few weeks :( We've had 224 days of solid service up until just now, aside from a few minutes for a software upgrade here and there. Still pretty good I'd say!
Update: Done. Please report any issues.
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Sunday, August 12th, 2007
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3:10 pm - Mascot contest
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| Friday, July 27th, 2007
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1:44 am - php5 evaluation setup
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dormando
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Yo all,
If you're interested in trying out php5 on rydia, simply name your files '.php5' instead of '.php' and they will use the latest release of php5.
The plan, at the moment, is to eventually add a portal option so one may "switch" your .php parsing between php5 and php4. Unfortunately, according to the PHP group, PHP4 will no longer be supported by next year, and will lose _all_ security updates shortly thereafter.
So... we'll need to start shuffling you guys (as slowly and easily as we can) into the wide-eyed world of php 5, and probably releases of mysql less than 5 years old, as well.
We're trying to do this in the least painful way possible, but I can't guarantee we can avoid all pain and anguish here :(
I'd like to also give you folks a heads up. A large part of why rydia.net's so rock solid for the lot of ya is because I both completely kick ass at this stuff (whoot! go me!) and simply don't anything unless I have to. Well, we might have a few bumps next week. I do need to go through and update most of the software running on rydia.net to keep everything in top shape for the coming year(s) of rock solid usability.
So please bear with us, and hopefully the fruits will provide you folks some spiffy keen new features to toy with! :) As always, if you spot a problem, do not hesitate to contact us through e-mail, IM, comments, etc.
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, July 23rd, 2007
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3:05 am - Service back up
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dormando
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Hey all,
My back hurts :)
We're back online in the new facility.
Since we had to do a pretty bad migration, you might not be able to load your site yet. If you get what looks like a _dns_ error. Go take a bath, take a nice walk, maybe make a sandwich, then try again.
If you still cannot access your site by monday evening (PST), please send us an e-mail, or comment here with whatever details you have about the issue.
I always forget _something_, so if some service on rydia isn't working like it should, also please let us know. I'll need to make sure we're in top shape :) As of now I believe we are, and so we're good!
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(comment on this)
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| Sunday, July 22nd, 2007
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4:07 am - Feels like we do this once a year.
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dormando
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Hey all,
So once again our great fancy colo space won't work out much longer. So we will be moving servers from San Jose, up the road a few miles to southern Fremont.
However, this change is for the best. We won't be sharing livingspace with anyone, and I'll have much more freedom to shuffle about hardware.
Unfortunately, due to the extremely short notice I've received, this move won't be very smooth. Expect websites to go offline for several hours as our IP addreses will change. Tomorrow (sunday), I will be prepping configuration changes, then sometime sunday evening we will run the servers over to the new datacenter and bring them back online.
At that time, I will post more information here on how to more quickly get back online with your e-mail and FTP uploads.
Please note that DNS will still resolve, and mail will not be lost during this time. You will not however be able to access your mail, sites, etc, during the outage.
We're really, really sorry for the inconvenience. Presently we've gone 370 days without an interruption lasting more than 15 seconds or so, so I figure a few hours isn't terrible for the record.
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(comment on this)
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| Thursday, July 19th, 2007
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3:01 pm - Rydia.net is having a Mascot Contest!
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lorelai
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Dormando are really excited to be able to inform you all that a massive redesign for Rydia.net and its webhosting service is coming in August! Both of us will be dedicating a ton of time to finish all the stuff on our to-do lists, completing all those projects we want to do, and making sure we give Rydia.net the T.L.C. that it has deserved for so long. We've both become better at what we do since our last revamp, so this one promises to be good!!! Details coming (really coming this time!) soon!
This is where you come in. We're going to have a new mascot. Her name is ArtBot. Those of you from The Art Corner IRC days may remember her, and she even had a few illustration/fanarts of her in the golden years. She will be making a grand re-entrance as the official mascot of Rydia.net!
And the purpose of this contest? We're asking you to show us what she should look like!
We hope you join! Be sure to pass this on to all of your artistic friends, the more entries we get the better Rydia.net will be. Plus, we are offering prizes, and more than one person can win this contest! It's a win-win-win situation!
READ MORE AND ENTER HERE YAY!
Call for entries ends on August 10, 2007!
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(16 comments | comment on this)
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| Sunday, July 16th, 2006
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8:00 pm - Short expected downtime
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dormando
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Hey,
Rydia.net's main server will be going down for about 10 minutes while we upgrade the machine's kernel. I will update this post when it is complete. Thanks :)
Update: Done. Let us know if you spot any troubles with the service.
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(comment on this)
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| Sunday, July 2nd, 2006
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8:48 pm - Account pricing update!
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dormando
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Hey all,
Lorelai and I have just finished updating the account and pricing structure for rydia!
The sweet stuff:
Basic accounts have had bandwidth increased from 10G to 15G, and the included webspace has gone from 200M to 500M
Full accounts have had bandwidth increased from 30G to 40G, and the included webspace has gone from 500M to 1000M
Super accounts have had their price dropped from $30 to an incredible $20!. Super account bandwidth has also increased from 180G to a gigantic 300G!
Account overages for basic and full accounts no longer exist. If you trounce a full account you should really jump to a super account :) Much more affordable!
For super accounts, extra bandwidth chunks cost $2.50 per 20G. I don't think many hosts offer these deals at all!
Sure, you might see 400G to 3TB of bandwidth offered by other hosts, but I can be pretty sure they will not allow you to *use* all of that bandwidth :)
At rydia.net what we advertise is what you're actually going to get. Don't be fooled by the cheaper, crummier hosts!
Super account price changes are effective as of their next billing cycle. Everyone's webspace has already been increased to the new minimums.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Monday, June 12th, 2006
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11:45 pm - Webmail upgrade and quick note
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dormando
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Hey all,
I've upgraded the webmail software to the latest (un)released version. This now includes a number of fixes and a spiffy search feature. However there's still no filtering and it looks like file uploads are still gimpy.
I took a quick look at the code and the file upload utility is super ghetto, no way it'll work with any random file.
So if you need to send attachments via the webmail client, I would highly recommend you zip them up first. Also try to not use spaces or weird characters (not A-Z 0-9 _ or -) in the filename. That should work completely fine, while other files will appear to not upload at all.
Let us know if you have any trouble with it. Also let us know if you're interested in webmail e-mail filtering. This will allow you to configure mail filtering on the *server*. Which will filter mail for your webmail client, and any IMAP client you use to access your mail. I've set it up with filtering because I use three installs of thunderbird, a Treo, and Sylpheed during the course of a day. Keeping my filters in one place is nice :)
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(comment on this)
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| Sunday, June 11th, 2006
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6:21 pm - Mail server upgrade
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dormando
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Hey all,
I'm going to upgrade the sweet half of the rydia.net e-mail server shortly. Since it's a big jump I'll be taking most of the system offline for up to an hour while I carefully test out the new system.
Update: I finished the work a few hours ago and everything seems peachy for now. It's ugly and hard to use but we now support server side e-mail filtering (mainly for the benefit of webmail folks). I'll see about making it usable over the next week. Also look for another doekaki release and a handful of other improvements I'm trying to wrap up :(
( details )
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(comment on this)
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| Saturday, June 10th, 2006
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2:19 pm - Issues with website availability
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dormando
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Hey all,
A bunch of you got bitten by an old nameserver finally dying on us. This makes some of your websites appear to be unavailable (when they really ought to be).
If you have *not* registered your domain name through us, but instead own your own domain name, please double check your domain's nameservers.
If you have the nameserver "ns.vadept.com" in there, your account comes from an older, simpler time of life and needs to be updated :)
Please ensure that your *only* two nameservers are as listed:
(1) rydia.rydia.net (72.5.72.234)
(1) gau.rydia.net (69.93.241.178)
I'll try to hunt down an exact list of folks whom are still being affected by this issue. Again, if you *we* registered your domain for you, your account is fine. We mass-updated all of the domains we maintain years ago.
I apologize for the problems this caused, it kinda crept up on us. We were fairly sure everyone had been notified quite a while ago, and the nameserver continued to work fine until very recently, and without notice it went away.
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(comment on this)
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| Monday, June 5th, 2006
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12:09 am - Rydia.net going forward
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dormando
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Hey all,
I'm pretty sure most (if not all) of you are aware of Dreamhost, Lunarpages, and their webhosting deals. As well as a lot of other smaller companies offering similar rates. $7/mo over there gets you far more resources than rydia.net's $30/mo account.
Now, stating the obvious; if more than 90% of their customers came within 10% of maxing out those resources, they would go out of business. The *absolute minimum* resource cost for them to support a single client using a terabyte of bandwidth per month is over $100. In all likelyhood it's probably closer to $350 and higher. However! This business model works because the 1% or fewer of customers whom actually use a lot of bandwidth end up bringing in a lot of referral customers. This is true for rydia.net as well.
Part of why people use rydia has been partly due to its competitive rates, partly to its charm, and for our direct service.
I would like to continue to maintain rydia using more unique feature offerings and making our service even better. Right now it's a bit lacking in a lot of areas and I really need the programming practice, so lets beef it up a bit. Thus I would like to ask you folks a few questions!
- Why do you use rydia.net?
- What sort of features would you like to see at rydia.net?
- Anything we could do that would be very beneficial for you? Save you time, money, effort and headaches?
- What sort of resources do you believe we should offer for your money? Bandwidth/storage.
- Should we move more towards acting as a community site and service instead? Like the old artcorner.org. Expanding www.rydia.net with more community features, releasing more community software and service-oriented features, while not focusing on enhancing the generic webhosting end as much.
Keep in mind that storage at rydia is given out as-needed and is pretty much free. If someone comes to us with a good reason to need space, we've never turned them down. We also have standby service and multiple layers of automated backups, which not all small services offer (but big places like dreamhost and lunarpages do).
Rydia.net exists to service an artistic community. We want to continue to be part of that community. Let us know what you think via whatever means you're comfortable with. Reply via comment, e-mail, whatever works for you!
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(22 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, May 22nd, 2006
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11:46 am
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| Tuesday, May 9th, 2006
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3:19 pm - Anime North 2006
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lorelai
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The Lorm are hitting Anime North this year for shiggles and to see good friends over the border. This will be ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) dormando's first trip into the great lands beyond North America so wish him well!!
This means we are representing the good folk of Rydia.net once again in the Artist Alley! This is an official call for artwork/portfolio samples, check out the details below and see if you want to participate this year!! :)
( Details and Stuff! )
Thanks and hope you can contribute! Questions/comments welcome!
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(7 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006
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11:20 pm - All set, I think
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dormando
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Alright... So at this point I believe _most_ if not all of the things that were busted during the move are fixed. I just added antispam/antivirus e-mail filtering back in (which seems to be working), and finished testing the onsite/offsite backup rotations.
Whew. So if something is still not working as it should, let us know.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Monday, May 1st, 2006
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12:25 pm - Redirection and temporary FTP/mail host
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dormando
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Hey all,
So I finally got proxying to work from the old service. So now if someone has the old IPs cached in DNS they will still be able to load your page. Many apologies for not having this working ahead of time; I've thus saved the configuration/setup for future use :(
However you may still not be able to FTP in or check your mail...
As a temporary measure, set your FTP or mail hostnames to:
temporary.users.rydia.net
... and it should magically work. Don't forget to change your hostnames back though! After a few days it should be all clear to use the old ones (ftp.rydia.net, mail.rydia.net).
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(6 comments | comment on this)
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1:58 am - Coming back online
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dormando
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Hey folks!
I'm hella tired.
We should however, be in business at the new shack. Sorry it took so long to do the cross-country shuffle, but I think we at least averaged 500mph or so ;)
Spam filtering is minimal and webspace quotas are broken for the moment. Those will hopefully both be repaired tomorrow night.
However! I am sure I've forgotten something. So *please* let us know if you have any trouble with your service, or something that was there before suddenly is no more or is broken.
Thanks again for your patience in getting this move done!
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(14 comments | comment on this)
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| Sunday, April 30th, 2006
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5:15 pm - starting the move in 15
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dormando
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Rydia's locking up for an hour or two while I transfer the last of the data over and start firing up services on the new box. Mail will spool up at our backup host in the meantime!
Thanks again for your patience with this.
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(comment on this)
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