The MacDeskBlog

I’ve been planning to migrate mail to a new server. The current server must have caught wind of it because it decided this morning to disable the announcement mailing lists. Rather than troubleshoot the problem, I am working on migrating mail. I hope to have announcements working again within the next few days.

[Update] The mail server decided that announcements are okay again. I’m still working on the transition to a new mail server, but the urgency is reduced. I hope to avoid any mail server or announcement outages during this process. [/Update]

[Update 2] It appears that I gummed up my mail server for a couple of days. Some of you probably received multiple daily updates or updates for Thursday or Friday this morning. I’m finished with the groundwork for this transition, but the cutover is still to come. [/Update 2]

Hey everyone,

I’m running quite low on submissions these days. I’m starting to think that MacDesktops may be running down. I am flush with pictures from a few dedicated photographers, but submissions in general are way down. Some of this I blame on Apple’s success. As Macs have become cool once again, and once Apple lost the label of “going out of business for 20 years,” the need for reaffirmation on our computer screens has diminished. Some of the blame I’ll also lay on Apple’s relatively weak print ads over the past few years. The Think Different campaign, the early iMac campaigns, and the late PowerMac/PowerBook campaigns all had a variety of catchy and quirky slogans in them. The stuff is mostly simple marketing speak. But mostly, it falls back on me. I haven’t worked on promoting the site for several years. That’s one of the side effects of keeping the site free with minimal advertising.

So, it looks like I’ll be curbing back to only one new picture on some days, probably starting this week. I’ll post two at time when I can and I will ramp back up to two each day if submissions rise again. I’ll continue to post anime on Mondays and NASA/ESA pictures on Saturdays, and I’ll continue to try to post one Apple picture on Tuesdays or Thursdays (always with a preference toward submitted ones over something I come up with myself).

Thank you to everyone who has been coming for so long, and to those of you finding MacDesktops for the first time.

Ryan

I’m pretty sure that I fixed site preferences. It appears that Dreamhost changed PHP versions and/or configuration on me, probably when I had to upgrade to a virtual private server. As a result, cookies were not being retrieved successfully.

I’ve received several reports that site preferences stopped working recently. I haven’t had time to investigate yet, but hope to do so soon. I apologize for the inconvenience in the meantime.

MacDesktops is up once again after a very strange DNS outage.

<GeekStuff>Yesterday, I installed four innocuous looking updates on my mail/DNS server using Software Update: Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 4 (v1.0), Airport Utility Software Update 2009-002 (v5.42), Safari (v4.0.1), and iLife Support (v9.0.3). The installs required a server restart. No big deal. When the server came back up, everything seemed to be fine. But this morning, my wife’s iPhone wouldn’t fetch mail. By the time I got to work, my iPhone wouldn’t either. When I finished up work, I finally got a chance to determine the scope of the problem, at which point I saw that Server Admin showed that DNS was running (green light and “DNS Service is: Running” message) but also said “Start Time: Not Started”. Very suspicious. Checking the log revealed that DNS shutdown at 13:27 yesterday after a series of zone transfer denials. I rebooted the server and headed home for a closer look. Running named in the foreground told me “/etc/dns/publicView.conf.apple:80: zone ‘0.0.127.in-addr.arpa’: already exists previous definition: /etc/dns/publicView.conf.apple:63″. Huh? I didn’t catch that immediately, but 3 minutes later when I tried again, it sunk in. So, I popped open publicView.conf.apple, ignored the “// PLEASE DO NOT MANUALLY MODIFY THIS FILE!” warning. And found the definitions for zone “0.0.127.in-addr.arpa.”. Sure enough, there were two of them. Not knowing which one to comment out, I picked the first one, saved the changes, and tried to launch named. It worked. I then looked up the error message about zone transfer denials, and figured that “Allows zone transfers” should be enabled (I suspect that I broke that a few months ago when I upgraded from 10.4 Server to 10.5 Server).</GeekStuff>

I have no idea which of the four updates messed up my publicView.conf.apple file. But the problem is fixed now and DNS has propagated to the secondary DNS.

Sorry about the unplanned outage over the weekend. Dreamhost decided that macdesktops.com was using too many resources to remain on a shared server. Rather that contact me and work with me to resolve the issue, they just disabled the main page and sent me an email. Fortunately, they were able to migrate everything to a virtual private server today, with minimal changes required on my end. My costs will go up modestly, but I’m still an order of magnitude below the costs when I had my own hardware co-located. I’ll need to keep an eye on performance and resource utilization over the next week to know what the ultimate bill will end up being.

My apologies for the unexpected downtime.

Ryan

Hey folks. Sorry for the delay on today’s second picture. As I was filling in the gap last night, I found that my mail/etc server at home was having some trouble. As I spent several hours fixing it, I didn’t pay enough attention to my posting and put the snakes up on the wrong day. The server is now working much better, and I fixed the posting date for the snakes. The biggest impact was that the announcements went out several hours late, and I had to send them twice to capture the late posting.

By the way, the submission queue is very short these days. If you would like to share any of your artwork, photographs, humor, or whatnot, please send them in.

Thanks to M. Breez for pointing out a bug in the site. The main page and using the “images from previous week” links should now display seven days of images every time. It was limited to the most recent 14 images which trimmed off an image for 15 picture weeks and displayed less than half of the images for those crazy 30 image weeks back in 2000 (April 5th if that relative link doesn’t jump you back far enough). And if you’re browsing back really far through the archives, you shouldn’t ever receive the same results for previous week searches. You may wonder how that could have happened, so I’ll tell you. If the “images from previous week” search finds no pictures, it checks the prior week for up to 28 days in total. The link was only changing by 7 days even if the search went back 14, 21 or 28 days. So, you could get the same results up to four consecutive times. Now, if the search goes back 28 days, the link will go back 28 days too.

Please let me know if think you find a new bug in this.

Ryan

This morning’s announcement missed one of today’s pictures. I suspect the database backup may have been running at the time, but I’m not certain. The unannounced picture has been up all day. I re-ran the announcements after I got home from work.

DreamHost Status » Blog Archive » Planned network outage July 11

On July 11, 2008 starting at 10pm we will have a brief network outage to restructure our routing tables. We are planning two hours to deal with any quirks that may come up, however our Cisco network engineer estimates the total downtime to be under 30 minutes.