The MacDeskBlog

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.

MacDesktops is 10 years old today. In 1998, I bought a new 20″ monitor. It was huge. It had a massive 1280×1024 resolution. I searched the web high and low for desktop pictures to fit it, but nobody provided pictures that huge. So, I generated a few desktops and shared them. I was pleasantly surprised that the site generated a couple thousand hits that month, and a few more in May. By June though, interest was trailing off. So, I decided to start posting new pictures weekly. Eventually, weekly became daily. MacDesktops joined MacNN for a couple of years. MacNN’s servers crashed and MacDesktops went offline for a few months. I unhitched from MacNN and relaunched the site independently where it has stayed ever since and weathered two more extended downtimes due to server outages.

In 1998, you’ll notice several Power Computing desktops, as Apple was ending its clone phase. Apple was fighting for survival with market share dwindling below 3%. MacDesktops’ pro-Mac pictures helped bolster the confidence of Mac users under siege. Apple’s combative advertising compared Intel processors to snails and lit the Intel “Bunny Suits” on fire. Apple encouraged everyone to Think Different by buying a Mac. Then came the iPod and iMac, each of which increased Apple’s standing and decreased pressure on Mac users everywhere. Apple had some great advertising campaigns when they returned to Chiat-Day, and they have produced some terrific products since 1998. When the two have converged, MacDesktops has benefitted from the excitement and buzz with tremendous submissions of Apple product desktops.

In 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq under false pretenses and I took a subtle stance here. This pissed off some people and encouraged others. When I posted Movie picture #146, I pissed off some more people. Such is life. I put a lot of effort into building this little soap box and there are times when I must stand on it and speak rationally to whomever will pause and listen.

During these past ten years, my own interest in the site has waxed and waned several times. Sometimes generating and posting pictures is a joy. At other times, it is a burden. I felt bad for contributors when the submission queue was 8-12 months long. And I feel worried now when it is less than 2 months. I rely more and more upon consistent contributors to fill up the queue when I would like to provide a wider variety of content. My huge 1280×1024 monitor from 1998 is now tiny. Creating original artwork for 30″ Cinema Displays takes more effort than making something for a 15″ monitor. In 1998, digital cameras were expensive while capturing low resolution images. Today, most of the desktops come from inexpensive, high resolution digital cameras.

How has your Mac experience changed over these past ten years?

After a very long spell without them, I put ads back on the site. I removed them for performance reasons. I hope that the new implementation will avoid the performance problems caused by the previous implementation.

Please support the site by supporting the sponsors.

I should have posted this days ago, but I completely spaced. MacDesktops.com email is down today (August 16th) due to a planned PG&E outage in our neighborhood. The power went out at 8:30AM Pacific time and was due to come back on at 2PM. Assuming that the power came back on when scheduled, the mail server is waiting for someone to turn it back on. So, if you sent something earlier today and received a bounce message, please resend it tomorrow.

I will be upgrading WordPress for http://macdesktops.com/weblog before next week. Previous upgrades have gone smoothly with just some brief cosmetic changes during the upgrade. If anything goes wrong, I’ll rollback and try again later.

I accidentally let the domain expire. When I realized that on Tuesday, I promptly renewed. The corrected DNS took several hours or perhaps overnight to propagate, but it should be fully refreshed by now. If the site still is not working from some of your computers or locations, just give some more time to refresh.

I’m very sorry for the inconvenience,

Ryan

MacDesktops.com will be offline Sunday morning from approximately 11:15PM PST Saturday night until approximately 4:00AM PST Sunday morning due to a power outage at the primary hosting provider.

See DreamHost Status » Blog Archive » Planned Power Outage for detail if you are interested.

I heard back from DreamHost, and it turns out that these errors are showing up because of memory limits applied to all accounts.

I have two options. First, I could decrease the memory footprint of the site. Well, that would be a huge undertaking which I’m not up for. Second, I could add another server and share the load. That will require some setup time and testing effort which I’m up for but not necessarily right now.

So, if you get an Internal Server Error, then just wait a few seconds and try again. I’ll try to have a second web server sharing the load some time within the next month or so.

I see that the server is occasionally returning Internal Server Errors since January 10th. I just submitted a support ticket regarding this.

If you receive one of these errors, there is probably nothing wrong with your request. Just try again.

I hope that Dreamhost will be able to diagnose and correct the issue soon.

UPDATE: You are connected to the new server. Site preferences can be saved here.

I am cutting over to the new server now. Site preferences saved on the old server after this point will not migrate to the new server. There should be no downtime associated with this cutover. This post will be different on the new server.