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2008-10-05: Thanks For The Beer! (Some Assembly Required)
So I decided to get into beer brewing as a hobby. I went to purchase my first round of equipment and supplies, and the vendor's website presented me with the paypal option! I totally forgot about having a paypal account, as it pretty much only gets used to accept donations here. Turns out, over the past few years, I've collected just enough to buy everything I had on my order! So that's pretty much like free beer... just some assembly required.

In all seriousness though, thanks to those of you that have donated over the years... you now know that funding is gonna get your friendly neighborhood sysadmin a little bit drunker. :-P ...
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2008-09-30: I Am An Idiot
I wrote a new script to help me manage DNS on the server. Apparently I didn't test it enough, and it borked DNS a few hours ago, making the server unreachable for a good chunk of people. I've fixed it, but the TTL is 3600 seconds, so most of you aren't gonna see this for at least another hour or so. I'm just posting this to let you know why the outage occurred. Totally my fault. Sorry! ...
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2008-08-18: I Can Haz Job!
Sorry, couldn't resist the lolcats-speak. But yes, I've recently been hired to a new job. I'll be a level 2 linux system administrator for a company called Rackspace. I'll be working the night shift, 10pm to 9am (CST), 4 days a week. I actually prefer the night shift, and the 4-day work week is a major bonus to me as well. The job starts next Monday, August 25th. This shouldn't really impact xepher.net in any big way, save that I'll be unavailable for that 11 hour chunk of time while at work. The upside is that I'll be getting a real paycheck again, and the expense of running Xepher.net out of my own pocket won't be as painful anymore.

I'm really pretty excited about the job. I'll be doing almost exactly the sort of stuff I do for xepher.net, but getting paid for it. The company looks to be pretty awesome as well, having been ranked as one of the best places to work in IT by several magazines (like ComputerWorld, Fortune, etc.) Touring their offices, I saw people with giant pirate flags over their work areas, arcade machines mixed among the desks, break areas with 360s and PS3s hooked up to plasma TVs, ice cream vending machines... all sorts of really cool stuff. I get a pretty good benefits package as well, and it'll be nice working with other nerds again. Heck, during my last interview, one of the guys actually asked me if I preferred Dilbert or XKCD. XKCD! I like to think that's the thing that got me the job, but really, it's just a really promising sign about personality types... especially compared to my last place of work, where no one in the entire office had even HEARD of Zelda, much less read XKCD.

The spectral wolf fears only fire! :-P ...
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2008-07-16: Downtime and Routing Issues
So I'll start this off by saying "It's not my fault, please don't hit me!" :-) The datacenter hosting xepher.net had a backbone link go down around 2 or 3am CDT this morning, which cut off access to xepher.net for about 1/3 of the internet. That is, most people could still get through, but many couldn't, and it just depended on where you were, and what route your connection came in through. The DC issued an announcement about it, and say they should have it under control now, with only some minor slowdown remaining. I'm not exactly thrilled with their service on this, as they'd been having interrmitent problems of this type for nearly a month now, and each time they claimed to fix it, it came back up. I may be considering a new datacenter if they have many more issues like this, as my patience is wearing thing (and I'm sure that's true for the rest of you too.) Hopefully this one was major enough that they really did fix it and not just tweak something. Anyway, if you (or one of your readers/visitors) is still having trouble connecting, all we can do is wait. Sorry! ...
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2008-07-02: Happy Canada Day!
Oh, and happy Independance Day for those of us in the US. Xepher.net continues to chug along pretty reliably as of late, so no major problems to report. A small hiccup the other day with /tmp/ filling up, but it was only affecting things for a couple hours. Just a reminder to anyone submitting a problem/outage report... most of the time these end up being local/semi-local/ISP problems on the reporter's end, ocasionally a problem with the datacenter/backbone routing at this end, and rarely an actual problem with xepher.net itself. Still, I like to take all problem reports seriously, so if you do see a problem or can't connect, feel free to let me know. It's very helpful though if you give me an exact time when you noticed a problem, preferably in UTC, but at the very least, specify what timezone/offset you're in. Also, any network information you know how to get (like traceroutes) is always useful. Send me whatever you got, and I'll look into things. Likewise, if you get error messages or other such things, give me all the info you can.

I'm currently tracking (aka, I think I fixed it, but I'm not sure) a transient problem involving an SSL "Change Cipher Spec". This only really applies when you're visiting the secure sections (user-services, webmail, or phpMyAdmin) of the site (no user sites are affected.) But if you run into this (your browser will give an error about "change cipher spec" and not load a secure page), please let me know. Note: this is seperate from the issue with the self-signed certificate which is mentioned on the help page. ...
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