Indablog

Update 2: Dreamhost finally recognized and corrected the problem on Thursday evening. That added up to five days of outage for a small minority of folks at DH using MySQL in a somewhat advanced but perfectly standard way. Even worse, nearly all DH’s clients were down for close to a day that week while the company worked out some nameserver gltiches. I’ve picked a VPS (eApps), but I won’t have time to devote to a migration before mid-June.

Update 1: Strong evidence points to a botched MySQL reconfiguration during a server reboot at Dreamhost. In any case, I’m now certain it’s not a hack. This is a “nicer” outcome for the world at large since it means malice is not a factor. But the outcome for me is worse. If it had been a hack, I’d need to restore from backups and get to work on tightening my security. But under these circumstances, I have to wait for DH’s tech support to fix the configuration. They’ve been remarkably slow to take action. While Indaba’s engine is dead in the water, I’m shopping for a new host.

The next step up from shared hosting is a Virtual Private Server (VPS). It’s ambitious, but moving to that kind of a platform now could be a smart move in case indaba takes off. It would smooth the transition to a dedicated server at a point when things might be very very busy. But it also means having to climb a Linux root/admin learning curve right now, when I’d rather be focused on building the application.

That said, the timing of Dreamhost going kablooey could have been a lot worse. I had been experiencing nearly weekly outages with them (site access problems were far more common than db problems), but didn’t want to deal with switching hosts while I was racing to get enough development wrapped up in time for alpha testing and demos at the Personal Democracy Forum. The site held up fine through the two days of the conference, Friday and Saturday. The outage started early Sunday morning.

Original Post: Indaba.org was apparently subjected to a major hack while I was traveling, and without Internet access. Perhaps I’m wrong, and it might be due to problems with my host, which was apparently beset by major problems this weekend, but all I can do now is start investigating.

Filed under: Development Chronicles