Content should resume tomorrow, assuming I’m not suffering from the same endless unavailability and timeout errors…
Posts Tagged ‘Site Administration’
This Day Eaten By Bluehost
Monday, October 2nd, 2023Tab Clearing Poll
Saturday, February 18th, 2023Like just about every blogger, I have some half-finished drafts of posts I never finished, many of which I still have Firefox tabs open for. Every now and then I have a hankering to bear down and finish one of them, if only to close a few tabs. So let’s have a poll!
[ays_poll id=5]
Let me know what you’re interested in and I’ll make an effort to finish that one. Just don’t expect it immediately…
Internet Out
Friday, November 4th, 2022No wide outage, just me. Spectrum says that they can’t get a technician out until Sunday, so expect extremely slow and/or terse blogging until then, because assembling a blog post on an iPhone sucks.
Did I Get a DDos Attack From Russia?
Tuesday, September 27th, 2022At some point during yesterday’s diagnosis of my ongoing technical difficulties, the BlueHost technician asked if 185.122.204.37 was my IP, because there were something like 30,000+ hits from it that day. I verified it wasn’t mine, and that it wasn’t Instapundit (which had linked me that day), and did a reverse DNS lookup, which brought up the following:
IP Location: 185.122.204.37
185.122.204.37 appears to be located in Moscow, Russia and allocated to Chang Way Technologies Co. Limited. Autonomous System Number (ASN) code for 185.122.204.37 is AS57523. IP Address local time zone is Europe/Moscow (+0300). PTR record is set to 185.122.204.37.
That’s a very curious site to be sending me traffic, since I’m seeing none of it in my stats counter. Could I be receiving a low-grade DoS attack due to my criticisms of Putin’s war in Ukraine, or even my coverage of China’s slow-motion economic collapse, given the Chinese-sounding company? Possibly, though given BlueHost’s history, there are certainly far more prosaic explanations for my ongoing difficulties.
Also, speaking of Internet bogusity, if you search for “Battleswarm” and some topic I’ve covered (say, “Beto”), the top links are not from my blog, but from some BS “https://jawabansmk.my.id” domain that’s scraping my content and then doing all sorts of clickjacking redirect bullshit. This may be entirely unrelated to the slowness issues and the Russian/Chinese IP above, but if you would, do a Google search “BattleSwarm” and something I’ve covered, and if that site comes up, click on those three dots next to the results that send feedback to Google to remove that result. Something like: “This is not battleswarmblog.com, this is a clickjacking malware site scraping the content of battleswarmblog.com. Please delete this domain from your listings.”
Also, normally I like everything to go to my posts, but given the recent difficulties, please feel free to reprint this entire message when linking, so regular readers will know what’s up.
As for a tech update on the ongoing problems, my dashboard actions are still dog slow, but the issue has been escalated.
Blog Outage Update
Wednesday, August 17th, 2022Yesterday afternoon, BattleSwarm went down with 500 errors. Contacting Bluehost, they said it was a problem with an old stats plugin. When I went into my dashboard to fix this, surprise! Nothing worked! And the blog was still down hard.
After two round-and-round chat sessions with Indian technical support personnel using vague screen replies, the problem still wasn’t resolved, and they told me it was a server-wide problem affecting many people. And indeed, I’m evidently not alone in having a problem with BlueHost.
Also, this notice from https://www.isitdownrightnow.com doesn’t exactly suggest a company brimming with confidence.
Right now, the blog appears to be up, though with the characteristic slowness and dropped connections during editing that seem common this year. I have not received the email that the second Indian technical support guy promised would be sent when things were resolved.
Hopefully it will stay up long enough to update some plugins…
Internet Outage
Friday, October 8th, 2021Spectrum is out right now, so the LinkSwarm is going to be extra late.
I mean, it was already going to be extra late, but now I have an excuse…
As Jerry Pournelle used to say “This day eaten by locusts.”
So: Open thread!
Technical Difficulties
Tuesday, September 7th, 2021My blogs were down this morning (both BattleSwarm and https://www.lawrenceperson.com/), and some features (like tag auto-population) still don’t seem to be working. No explanation from BlueHost for the outage except “There are too many process, I killed all the process but it keeps re-generating,” which is a symptom of the issue, not the issue itself.
Anyway, the upshot is no real blog post this morning, so instead enjoy a compilation of random Golden Retriever videos.
There Is No LinkSwarm, Only Zuul
Friday, June 25th, 2021A few days ago, I found it strange that my MacBookPro lid wouldn’t close properly. Then it seemed to spontaneously reboot. Then yesterday I noticed this:
That, dear reader, is the bottom of my Mac bowed outward due to the swollen battery issue. A trip to the Apple store ensued. They’re going to replace the battery, and possibly the bottom of the case, due to the issue, free of charge, despite it being out of warranty. Plus the Mac was still working, so I was able to back everything up just in case they need to swap out the drive. And I have a backup MacBookPro, a lovely parting gift from my previous employer, so I’m not dead in the water. So all I lost was two hours.
But let me tell you: two hours is a lot when you’re constantly running the needle into the red. This week I’m finishing up cranking on a project at work that ships today, I have to get started on a new Lame Excuse Books catalog that’s already more than a month later than I usually send it out, I’m trying to get up to full speed on my summer exercise regime, etc. Frankly, I need a break. So I’m using the repair time to enjoy a blogging semi-hiatus for a week or so.
But a semi-hiatus for me is going to look like a lesser mortal’s blog at full tilt. I think I’ve managed to put up something here every day for probably over 700 days (maybe 1,000 or more), and I want to keep that streak alive, but expect something more like a single video or tweet each day rather than full-blown posts. Just don’t expect long, detailed posts for a bit.
I need to use the time to get some work done around the house, and clean up in advance of a July 4th gathering.
Next week: Maybe two LinkSwarms. We’ll see how it goes…