As you may *not* have noticed, Attrition has had a little bit of downtime lately. For the most part, this has been limited to business hours, Monday through Friday, from opening to closing bells on the world financial markets. It all began long ago, in a galaxy far, far away...
The last time this happened, there was a slight issue with noise coming from the box. The problem had been dealt with swiftly each time; as the box made sounds signalling its impending doom, it was kicked. Notice that the previous "kicked" was not in quotation marks; it was literally *kicked* with a human foot to make the noise stop. This solution actually worked... for about a month. Much as the way that Cancer Omega kicks liberals, the noises soon stopped, but the whining soon started again. It was then decided that a new box would be deployed, and what we have been using since then has simply been called "New Forced".
Four and a half years later...
In early March, "New Forced" unexpectedly went silent. Our NOC noticed that the box had shut itself down, and called us on our Bat-Phone early one Sunday morning. During the conversation, it was mentioned that the box was giving off, well, a *smell* that would usually indicate Southern-fried hardware. As the box was booted back up, the smell persisted, but it held up... for about 30 seconds. Then it was down again. One more reboot attempt succeeded, and it remained up, but we knew that a box like "New Forced" could only take so much d2d virtual leg-humping, so...
We bought a new box and made the decision to co-lo it at a new provider. The new hosting decision had nothing to do with the service provided by the previous host, which was absolutely above and beyond the call of duty for the last 8-ish years. The choice to abuse and be abused by a new host is never an easy one, so when the opportunity presents itself, we'll be offering our previous host and NOC operator plenty of sushi, sake, and (medium-priced) hookers, as long as we can find a way to make sure all of it is tax-deductible.
Not taking any chances, the box was sent to Lyger this time, since Jericho had a mini blow-out during the config of the last box (see link above re: floppy disk shattering). With absolute confidence (and the fact that he's a Luddite with no skills in any other OS), Lyger installed Slackware 13.0 on the new box and began the configuration process. As always, Slackware has been very, very good to us over the years, and this time was no exception. Package after package was installed cleanly and gracefully, always with messages to let us know when something needed to be changed or reconfigured. It was, as some may say, like the finger of Sioda had touched us.
Except for Apache. And Ruby. And ImageMagick (don't fucking ask). And about 15 shell scripts with borked paths that needed to be fixed after the first cron fired.
All should be fixed now, with the exception of reverse DNS and a virtual hosting issue that we hope to have resolved very soon. If anyone happens to see anything funky with the new box, please let us know. Even though this was an easier transition than the last one, quite a few people were still involved, and they deserve our appreciation and mention:
Not really looking for donations or any other type of financial support, but if anyone has an idea about a wireless router that can handle multiple static *public* IP addresses, please let us know. We'll be working on that reverse DNS thing as we can, but for now hardware is limited, so any input is appreciated.
Welcome to "New New Forced". Same shit, different decade.
-- Attrition Staff
Update:The reverse DNS and virtual hosting issues have been resolved. Thanks to everyone who mailed in with suggestions... we won't tell you what we did, but it did involve a blindfold, kneepads, and the promise of college trust funds for one staff member's demon spawn. That is all.