Woot! New network switch just arrived.

I am replacing the weird little neon hunk of plastic that I think is a network switch...but the Mandarin confuses me......with a solid linksys switch I ordered from newegg. Thanks to everyone that helped donate!

I think the switch was by far the "weakest" point in the network setup, and most likely to fail next. So this is a good upgrade.

A switch should take less than a minute to install so I am not bothering with an RW intercom message. But posting this here just in case I blow something up and the site stays down longer than expected.

After this just need to get some automatic/remote server monitoring hardware and we will be set!

New status widget and update on google

New widget

So for fun I have setup a little widget on the blog to show the status of the RationalWiki servers.

If the server is down it just says server down. If the server is up and working it will display the number of hours and minuets that the server has been up "straight." That means no reboot or power down. I am also displaying the 15 minute running average for the CPU load so people can see how busy the server has been recently.

Google update

So based on my searching we are back on top for Andrew Schlafly and Poe's Law which were two of our bigger hitters for search engine referred traffic. Not everything is reindexed yet but it looks like we should recover all right from our downtime.

Hardware replacement for real this time

Okay, so now that our magic new backup system appears to be working, I can actually do what I meant to do yesterday. So the site is down because I am replacing hardware.


Obligatory Google prod of the day:

Denyse O'Leary in honor of the first person to openly admit to considering a defamation lawsuit against us.
Esther Hicks just because.

UPDATE: It looks like everything went exactly as planned, smooth upgrade, site back online. I will continue to monitor the situation to make sure nothing weird happens.

Hardware replacement, downtime

I think I have discovered the issues with the random shutdowns that took the site off line. As is the case with everything in life the solution to the problem is going to cost money and time.

I will be heading out to purchase some new hardware this afternoon and its installation will cause some downtime. If all goes as planned it will be less than an hour. I will give a 20-30 minute warning on RW before I take things down.

Google prodding still needed btw:

Conservapeida
Gish Gallop

UPDATE: Okay I lied. I am trying to get a few things done at once, and the completion time on task 1 is taking longer than I anticipated so the hardware replacement has been delayed till late tonight or tomorrow.

Poking Google

We got dropped by the search engines so I am going to poke a few of the important pages, and hope it prods re-indexing of the site:

Poe's Law
Andrew Schlafly
Conservapedia

If you have a blog or other dynamically updated website please consider poking these pages, or any of your favorite RationalWiki pages.

All systems a go

Well RationalWiki should have all cylinders firing.

Sorry for the downtime, but there was naught I could do. I will be doing some thinking about how to expand remote administration of the site over the next few days. This probably means a mini-fund raiser will be in order but hopefully we can get something set up that will prevent this kind of disaster in the future.

Getting things back online now

Not a hundred percent yet.

Main thing to do is some troubleshooting and then apparently importing pages that have been made on other wikis.

Database is locked for now.

Stay tuned for updates.

Update: Everything is working. NX is going to import pages from other wikis and then open up the database for the grand reunion. I am going to get food an caffeine. We have some "rebuilding" to do though since google dropped us. I will post on RW later tonight to poke people for help getting us back to awesome again.