Upcoming Outage: Site Maintenance

[Ben Ruset]

If the folks that wrote the forum software came out with a good gallery program, I'd probably pay for it and switch to it. The problems are:

a) Most gallery software is absolutely horrible and full of security holes.
b) Most gallery software is not user-friendly.
c) The URLs to the images will change, which means that 5+ years of posts that have links to images in them will break.

The nice thing about the gallery, though, is that it allows a casual visitor to come along and browse through photos without having to dig through forum posts.

 

[MarkBNJ]

Agreed, I think that is the major advantage to having your own gallery. But all the drawbacks are valid as well.

Hey, on another topic, I've noticed quite a few problems recently with the site being unavailable. During a large chunk of the day today I was getting DNS lookup failures, and I've seen that before. I don't know if you're just making a lot of changes or you're having problems with your host. If it's the latter I can highly recommend Rochen, the company I use. I'm hugely impressed by their service and technical expertise, and have become quite a fan.

 

[Ben Ruset]

I haven't been making changes.

I self host the webserver and my own DNS on a virtual private server. The site is too big to run on shared hosting.

The next time you see a DNS error shoot me an email. Maybe send me the output of a dig or nslookup as well. bruset@njpinebarrens.com

 

[Boyd]

I've noticed quite a few problems recently with the site being unavailable. During a large chunk of the day today I was getting DNS lookup failures

I check in here pretty often and have very rarely seen this myself...

 

[MarkBNJ]

One of the reasons I posted it was to see if anyone else had the problem. It's the only site I've seen this issue with, so I don't believe it's a general problem with my ISP. Next time it happens I'll shoot Ben an email and he can have a look.

 

[Boyd]

FWIW, I was getting errors a couple hours ago trying to connect to the site. Sorry, I should have run some dig output but I didn't.

 

[Ben Ruset]

I saw the same problem from my desk. But I checked from home (remotely) and it was fine. I'm not sure what the issue is.