The MacDeskBlog

I’ve been sitting on some news for a while and I think it’s time to share it. I was notified last month that I’m being laid off from my regular job of the past 16 years. As strange as it may sound, this turns out to be a good thing. My wife and I have been planning for life post-career for quite some time now. Though we’re short of our targets, we’ve decided that we are going to execute on our plans. We are moving out of the country early next month. Once there, I’ll share more details.

Don’t panic.
I will continue to run MacDesktops from our new home, and there will be no break in service during out transition. I am still struggling with the last pieces of the mail server transition, but I’m going to tackle that today (Wednesday) and hope for the best.

I’m sure that you’ve noticed that despite my call for submissions a few months ago, the site has subsisted on pictures from Frank J Sinkavich, Stan Peyton, Timothy M. Urbanek, Victor Hamberlin, NASA, and me since then. Please join me in thanking Frank, Stan, Timothy and Victor for their tremendous contributions to the site. I have been accumulating new submissions during these months. Once we get settled, I’ll increase postings with those new submissions. So please, keep sending them in.

Thank you for your support,
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

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

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 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 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.

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.