[Alex Pepple]

Dear Eratosphereans,

First my apologies to all of you for the recent loss of service which went on for days on end. Almost one week ago, our servers suffered catastrophic hardware and disk drive failure at the hosting company's premises . I have been working closely with the hosting company's engineers first to troubleshoot, and then, attempt to resolve the problem. The good news is that several sleepless nights later, everything is running smoothly again. I had to proceed slowly, and with extreme caution in order to prevent any data loss. I didn't think it was going to take this long. Unfortunately, it did! The good news though, is that I succeeded in preventing any data loss, and the server has been transferred to new and stable hardware.

The next thing I'd like to do is take measures to ensure that such we never suffer any such service interruption. This would involve a more redundant and fault-tolerant setup. I'm hoping that with your kind support, I, we should be able to achieve that. Right now, though it's been a very late night, and I do need a little sleep! So, I will be writing more on this when my I can think more clearly.

Thank you all for your patience and continued support!

Cheers,
...Alex

[Jim Hayes]

Thanks alex, patience I've got, if you need anything else let me know.

Your efforts ae much appreciated;

Jim

[Clive Watkins]

Dear Alex

Let me add my thanks to Jim's for your hard work in getting Eratosphere back on line. Bravo!

Kind regards...

Clive Watkins

[David Mason]

I felt rather lonely without you, though I'm only a periodic visitor. I'm grateful you're back.

Dave

[Alex Pepple]

Dear Jim, Clive, David,

Thanks for your kind words, and, your continued support!

Cheers,
...Alex

[Tracy Estes]

Alex,

I am Staff at the Gaz and many of your members are encountering major problems logging in.

My 'puter went right to you today, than wouldn't access your site until I backdoored through Google.

Rose K
Howard Miller
Jimmy Gribble
Jacob Flanders
David Gwilym Anthony

plus I'm sure many others.

I thought you needed to be aware of this.

Trace

[Rachel]

I was one of those people whose computer couldn't find your domain until I followed Rose Kelleher's instructions in that Gazebo thread. It may simply be that some people will have to wait for their own ISP's DNS server to update.

Rachel

[Janet Kenny]

Alex,
I have already said thank you on General Talk.

I missed this place terribly.

I am about to disappear (well in a couple of weeks) and was afraid I'd lose touch before I can come back again.

Your hard work is very much appreciated.

Janet

[Alex Pepple]

Thanks for the heads up, Rachel.

And, Thanks, Janet for the kind words ... here's wishing you a pleasant time away in advance!

I suspect that the access problem described by Rachel may be due to the fact that I had modified the name server pointers for Able Muse sometime after we came back online from DNS server format to an IP-based one. This was as an extra safety precaution to make sure that should there be a need to switch to a different service provider in the future for any reason, the propagation delay will only minutes to about an hour, instead of hours to days.

For those of you not technically inclined, DNS, in simple terms, configures the way a server can be found on the Web by other systems. There is a propagation delay for any DNS change which under a standard setup can range from a few hours to 24 hours or more. There is nothing I, or anyone else can do to minimize this standard delay – it’s just the way the Internet works. However, once the new setting goes through, I expect propagation delays of only a few minutes to an hour or so in the future.

So, if you're having problems now, I’d recommend that you refresh your browser to make sure you’re loading the latest page each time you access Able Muse or Eratosphere. If the problem persists, then try the Google workaround suggested by Tracy. If that also fails as well, then, you may simply have to wait for a few more hours (it can take up to 24 hours!) for the DNS pointer changes to propagate through the web.

So, my apologies to those of you experiencing problems. However, let me know if it continues past beyond 24 hours from now.

Cheers,
...Alex

[Howard]

I've regained access just in the past 30 minutes. Good job and thanks to Alex and those who got things up and running again.