Comments on: So, what happened?

By: Arty

Arty — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:35:32 +0000

As of 2010-02-08:13:32 (GMT) The site appears to be unresponsive. Looks like the system accepts the initial connexion but then the webserver never responds.

The storiesonline.org site seems to take a long time to respond, but then comes up with the usual home page.

Sorry for the slightly innapropriate use of commenting, but I’m not at my usual computer and I’m accessing the site via Lynx (which is a whole new ‘experience’ in itself).

Regards, Arty

By: cmsix

cmsix — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:31:49 +0000

You’re doing a hell of a job. Now that my left “great toe” has been removed maybe I can start adding to the burden you have by posting more.

cmsix

By: fast turtle

fast turtle — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 13:14:41 +0000

Never Noticed the downtime, which is the nice thing about having multiple tabs open to track large stories.

By: Inos

Inos — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 03:32:44 +0000

The problem with making things follproof is that we always underestimate the ingenuity of fools.

By: Mr.Mike Leonard

Mr.Mike Leonard — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:52:25 +0000

Lazeez,

Very good Job….Iknow problems can be.

Everything is working fine

Mike

By: Bonkers

Bonkers — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 16:28:47 +0000

I have done moves of all sorts of electronic equipment over the years. The one thing that stands out is that no matter how well planned, the feces WILL hit the rotating air mover. All a being can do is try to minimize the outage. Y’all did GOOD. Thank you for your efforts.

By: David

David — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 01:00:27 +0000

Lazeez, I just wanted to make a brief comment. I have been a devoted player of “World of Warcraft” for about 9 months. In that time, servers are taken offline on a weekly basis. On occasion, crashes have caused specific servers to be down for many hours.

In contrast, I have been a regular user of StoriesOnline for (I figure) a good 5 or 6 years now. In all that time, I think that I can count periods of significant SOL downtime on a single hand; in fact, this recent event was the only one I can remember in all that time.

Thus, I wished to pass along my most sincere thanks for having such a steady, strong and dependable service.

By: Diego

Diego — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 15:22:10 +0000

Well what is a few hours when yoy have such a great site that is up most of the time.

Thanks for a great site

Diego

By: Highway-101

Highway-101 — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 05:06:17 +0000

I can imagine the sweat dripping down your brow as drives started failing… we’ve all been in technical hell in some capacity. Technology is great until it stops working (or the electric plug gets pulled.)

Those of us who have been around a while back-up a lot. Good advice to hear again however.

I wish you luck on the move and getting your array replaced. Hopefully the usual techno rule of ‘cheaper, faster, better’ (than the previous RAID array) will hold true for you.

We all appreciate your site, Lazeez.

By: Tweedlebinder

Tweedlebinder — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 13:37:44 +0000

This is such a GREAT sight for so many of us that a little down time is nothing we will worry about. We all know you are and will do everything you can to keep everyone happy and up-to-date. — Thanks for the GREAT work.

By: AX

AX — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 11:43:11 +0000

@Maxx: As long as he drops the TTLs on storiesonline.org 24 hours in advance, the domain will propogate in 5 minutes. Considering that the site is going to be down for longer than that, I don’t think the main bottleneck is going to be propagation.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:58:29 +0000

Dreaming Bear,

Having a surge protector for a lighting strike is like having good shocks when driving off the cliff

By: Maxx Excaliber

Maxx Excaliber — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 19:43:56 +0000

Thanks for the heads-up, Lazeez. I wish I could afford to help more financially, but I’m strapped for funds to just pay my bills… really don’t have anything left over.

Good luck with the move and if you don’t mind, can you post the new IP here, in case DNS doesn’t propogate quickly enough?

By: Dreaming Bear

Dreaming Bear — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 18:07:14 +0000

Lord I feel your pain.

An electrical storm took out my computer in spite of my supposed ‘surge protector’.

Well, here’s hoping thing smooth out for everybody.

And Thanks btw for the site and the efforts you guys are always making to keep it going!

I know its not much to hear but it is appreciated.

By: Julian

Julian — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:27:23 +0000

@dave smith

im going to guess you have a mouse wheel?

what i think you did is held the control button then moved the mouse wheel which will increase or decrease the font, try it and see if you cant undo it.

By: Pat

Pat — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 22:08:48 +0000

I know how the cord pull issue works… I was in our server room removing an old server from a rack. I touched a network patch cable, and we lost 24 workstations simultaneously. Bad patch cable, that I now need to replace. I pulled the cable and put it back in to get the stations up. But that took 24 people screaming “What did you do?” and 15 minutes to diagnose the problem.

By: roger

roger — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:09:04 +0000

I am already going into premature withdrawal due to lack of my SOL Fix.

Keep up the very good work

By: larry haymacher

larry haymacher — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:50:09 +0000

I really enjoy your site and most of the stories contained on it. Hope you get your problems resolved quickly. I do understand that things happen but hope they ate few and far between.

By: Arthur Keith

Arthur Keith — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:20:59 +0000

Is something else wrong today or is it that no one is posting anything?

By: Victor Echo

Victor Echo — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:45:07 +0000

Good luck on the move. Having been there, done that, got the scars, from the move I know that Murphy works overtime and it never goes the way you want it to, as fast as you want it to and as smoothly as you want it to. And good luck with the array!

By: Henrie Timmers

Henrie Timmers — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 04:51:31 +0000

If you need to go off line for a few days, Lazeez, then that’s how it goes. Reminds me of the old days when you used to turn the server off at night so you could sleep!

Best of luck with the move and the repairs.

If you need a hand announcing to all the authors, give me a shout.

Henrie

By: Fabriglas

Fabriglas — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 03:21:56 +0000

Phew.. thought my fix of stories was gone.. great to hear the probles being sorted

By: Tezza

Tezza — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 02:51:39 +0000

Aw shucks, some clumsy doofus triped over the cord.

And I was just thinking that one of the alphabet soup gang did a raid…

By: Lazeez

Lazeez — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:12:23 +0000

@ Tandaari

Nope, has nothing to do with the crash. The stories are there.

By: Lazeez

Lazeez — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:11:41 +0000

@ Dave Smith,

Since the library system does not support bookmarking more than one story at a time, I’m assuming that you were using the bookmarking system in Firefox. Unfortunately, I don’t have a windows box right now, so I have no idea what you did. Check the ‘View’ menu and select the ‘Reset’ item in the Zoom submenu.

By: Tandaari

Tandaari — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:03:18 +0000

I assume it has something to do with the server crash and restore, but it appears that most of the LazLong stories are now missing. Was reading the Fountain of youth and fountain of youth 2 series. (Had just read the Wagons Ho! universe stories, and they are gone too.

By: familyman

familyman — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 21:39:57 +0000

Good luck with the transfer.

The best stories site will never fall again!

By: DAVE SMITH

DAVE SMITH — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:58:02 +0000

Was bookmarking some stories and used the control key to enable me to add more than one story to my Library – after I bookmarked four stories by the same author the screen presentation started to shrink and is now almost to small to read. I use the latest Firefox as my default browser. I am unable to get the screen back to normal size – can you help

DAVE

By: jim676

jim676 — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:44:00 +0000

Lost ya Sunday while reading new story on bluedragonauthor’ pages, still haven;t gotten all of his stories restored including the one I was reading will try again Friday Nite.

By: Don

Don — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:09:09 +0000

We hope that the Move will go smothly with no added problems. Thanks for hard work you do to provide Storiesonline to the web

Blessed Be!

By: Lazeez

Lazeez — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:25:59 +0000

@25

We have a twitter account:

http://twitter.com/storiesonline

However, I haven’t been good at keeping it updated. I’ll try to do better in the future. This blog and the site’s discussion board are hosted on other companies servers so they don’t get affected by server outages.

By: geoff

geoff — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 11:00:19 +0000

evening lazzez,thankyou for the warning on the server shift on friday.been a fan of S.O.L for nealy 2 yrs now & i recon you,ve been busting a boiler to keep the site going,this ozzie appreciates your effort.if murphy or other cretins try to spoil things for you,kick their BUTTS out the door (LOL LOL).kindest regards from ozzie land,geoff

By: Tacit_Blue_VLO

Tacit_Blue_VLO — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 06:12:40 +0000

Engineering to prevent some clod from pulling out a power cord…That’s chancy.

Keel haul the bozo in question!

By: Mike Hare

Mike Hare — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 05:20:28 +0000

Would it be possible for you to have a presence on Twitter or something where users can go to check if they can’t get in. A simple “Yes we are down folks. Hope to be back by —- gmt” would help

By: rache

rache — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 03:03:25 +0000

Good luck, Lazeez. Do what you gotta do and I’ll light a candle in church tonight. Actually, I’ll blow someone else’s candle out and light it. I like getting God’s attention when I ask Him for something important.

rache

By: Winger

Winger — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 02:21:17 +0000

Ok, Your back up and running. Now you just have to make plans for future issues. Of course you have to remember the old saying – “The best-laid plans of mice and men”. You have a great site and have done an excellent job of keeping it up and running. Don’t let the Mice win.

Winger

By: Wilbur

Wilbur — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 01:14:31 +0000

I can live with it. Thank you for letting us know what happened and what will be happening. That little bit of consideration goes a long way.

By: Scimitar

Scimitar — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 23:01:19 +0000

It’s great to discover that I am not the only one dealing with idiots.

Good luck on the 19th and the next date,

By: AW

AW — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 22:55:09 +0000

Just before the crash I had just rec’d a dozen 10-10-10 votes on assorted stories and then they were lost. So—I was wondering if …

By: Rob

Rob — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 22:53:22 +0000

Thanks for the Info/Update. You keep this place running as best as possible. A++

By: cmsix

cmsix — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 22:27:52 +0000

Bummer. I hate it for you and wish I could help, but if I did you’d have more than one plug on the floor.

cmsix

By: Daniel

Daniel — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 22:05:26 +0000

I had da shakes man. My Jones was Really

Really gettin’ to me. Ya came back up just in time to save me from full blown withdrawal.

By: misterbean

misterbean — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:35:04 +0000

Nope

It’s “Smith’s Law” – not Murphy’s Law

And Smith’s law states simply = that -

Murphy was an optinist!!

By: Roy

Roy — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:32:35 +0000

Sorry for your problems and until you had the problem I had not remembered how much time I spend connected to SOL .

I do sympathize with the problems you are having and cheer for you to get it all finished. Good luck in getting it all completed

Roy

By: Brad In Canada

Brad In Canada — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:33:09 +0000

Well I must be a schmuck cause I never noticed. i guess i need to get over here more often. Anyhoo thanks for the update and I won’t get annoyed on friday.

By: ewlon

ewlon — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:29:31 +0000

Maybe it’s time to go to a secure co-location site provided by your carrier. Might reduce the local loop cost, too.

By: Rick

Rick — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:19:13 +0000

Like they say in road construction — Temporary inconvenience for permanent improvement.

And it really proves that you can’t engineer for stupidity. Thanks again for the site, and the ever mounting amount of time it takes to keep it running.

By: jason

jason — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:05:05 +0000

I agree this is the best site I know of. Lots of choices, I hope it stays for a long time. Thanks for the site and explanations.

By: andy

andy — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:33:54 +0000

so we lose our storytime for a wee while but the result will be the all nice and clean back again SOL. will have to resort to what are they called again oh yes paperback books love the site though I had upset something when I could not get online phew so just a numpty with big feet can cause all this pain regards

By: SnowSnake

SnowSnake — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:02:52 +0000

Hey Lazeez!

Thanks for the explanation! Was wondering what had gone wrong. No problem with the outages! You run one of the best sites on the Internet and due to your preparedness, this was a minor glitch. You’re right of course, about backing up. It’s not *if* your equipment is going to fail, it’s only a matter of *when*. And some guy named Murphy usually decides the when…

-mitche