docsmachine
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And We're Back!
🕑 Added 2018-10-05 03:02:57 +0000 UTC Finally, after more than a week, we're back! TWB is currently showing the strips from back when everything crashed, but I'll be updating the updater later this evening, and we should be back to being 100% caught up by Friday morning.I'll probably have a note for Friday's update, explaining what happened for those readers who aren't Patrons, regular readers of the Guild or MCB, or otherwise knew what was going on.
For those who offered or suggested alternate hosting, thank you, and I'm definitely keeping options in mind at the moment. A week-plus total outage is unacceptable, and I've been offered little more than "gee, that's too bad" as recompense.
But, on the other hand, I've been with this host for 20 years now, and while we have had the occasional outage over the years, up until now they've been both very rare and generally brief.
I'm given to understand that this outage started with the discovery of malware on one part of the system, which was taken offline to clear it, and then further inspection revealed a wider spread of the infection, requiring taking nearly the entire system offline.
That led to either the cause of or the discovery of a hardware issue- I have no idea what- which then required physical replacement.
Between- I'm assuming, here- having to get new hardware shipped to Alaska (if not over from Asia) *and* the scanning of all backups for traces of the malware, it all took a great deal of time. Like many of you, I was greatly annoyed that they couldn't muster the hardware to so much as put up a customized "sorry, we're having server issues, we're working on it!" page, and instead left all of us- me included- in the dark, staring at a blank screen for a week, then a meaningless default page for another three or four days.
Had I known it was going to go on this long, I might have thought harder about migrating to another host, but that's a decision I wasn't going to take lightly.
Regardless, we're back, and hopefully with fresh servers and upgraded security and all that. We should be pretty stable from here on out, at least for a while.
I would ask a favor, however: I'm sure there's more than a few people out there, not part of the regular boards or here on Patreon, who likely bailed after more than a week of the site being missing, and may therefore not know we're back up. If you could help me out by spreading the word a bit, I'd sure appreciate it. :)
Thank you, and thanks for your patience!
Doc.
Comments
As an IT-type person, a host serving the wrong content is terrifying - I'd never trust their security again.
Joe Johnson
I wonder if the host had servers from SuperMicro and the 'hardware failure' was the discovery of an errant chip on the motherboard... :/
Raaky
What irks me is not that there was malware or a hardware failure. It's that they didn't have a backup plan in place. Crap happens, computers break, but that shouldn't break the whole company. Especially if your company's specialty is supposed to be keeping websites up and running. It kinda feels like they threw your site under the bus because they thought they could get away with it.
Raaky
They showed the wrong page for a while. You're probably experiencing a DNS caching issue. Basically your service provider still thinks the-whiteboard.com should point to opieart. It'll go away once their routers refresh their caches.
Pete
Nothing malicious - it was reported that that site showed up for a time during the outage, we assume it's hosted on the same server as Doc and some temporary config glitch caused it to serve pages from the wrong site. Most people seem to be seeing The Whiteboard back where it should be now, so you might need to refresh some caches or just wait for things your end to catch up.
Kaz Redclaw
dot con?
Seems like someone else snagged the long-time url for their own use. The-whiteboard.con now links to opieart, some random dude's page.
Pete
FYI the placing of the strips has got a little screwed up - the 26th of September page has no image on it, and the 27th has two.
Major disaster here - the TWB icon on my bookmarks toolbar has changed to the MTA icon from the regular 'Doc" icon, and I can't change it back! (Sob!)
Been getting "connection timeout" for months now...
I'm getting it again in Oz. Try clearing your browser cache, maybe? Sometimes they get stuck & won't update properly until you do.
Still getting a blank page here... have been for months... maybe they're blocking people outside usa...
BlackestDawn
Honestly, I would look through your contract with that hosting firm, especially the SLA section. There is a chance they could be contractually obligated to compensate you in some form. If they have no SLA at all then I would seriously look at another provider.
jay maechtlen
posted an update on Facebook, so the few folks that see my stuff will know.
Foradain
And there was much rejoicing (yea!)
orion hax
Information flow is a hard and dangerous game. The people that know the right information are hard at work trying to fix the issue and the people talking to the upset users are as in the dark as the users. Bad/incorrect updates to users/customers can cause as much or even more damage to the relationship as silence. I have been on both sides of this game and neither is fun.
