Category Archives: web site

Continuing internet problems

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Although our connection came back up on Sunday, it was only a 500 kbps connection, and it remains so today.
It *should* be a 5,000 kbps connection.
So for some reason, we’ve been throttled to 1/10th of our paid-for speed.

When I tried to access igs.net today, I encountered a new page that redirected me to cia.com, which is some sort of parent company of IGS and other DSL providers.
So it looks like they were doing some sort of big switcheroo and it screwed up, big time.

We’ve been looking around for another DSL provider, and are looking closely at TekSavvy.
If anyone has any opinions on other providers, feel free to comment!

Internet down

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Late on Friday afternoon our internet service went down.
It’s still down now, but I can access our ISP’s site at least, from which I got a phone number.
I called and an automated (but constantly-cutting-out) voice semi-squaked that service was out for many customers in southern Ontario, and that the office is open on Saturdays at 10am.
I stopped listening at that point since I now knew when to call back.

Our ISP is (mostly) igs.net.
It’s kind of weird.
We’re also under 3web.com and cybersurf.net.
When istop.com gave up on its residential DSL service in August of 2006, the company in control of our destiny was never quite clear.
CyberSurf was mentioned prominently in related email, but the company itself is very minimalistic online.
At some point I was redirected to 3Web, which seems to be some sort of joint Rogers/Bell thing, offering both DSL and Cable high-speed access.

Ah well, hopefully it will be all sorted by tomorrow.
We’ll see.

mail hiccup

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Turns out postfix on tnir was only accepting mail from certain specific hosts since I brought it back up, so any mail sent to anyone on tnir (including me) over the last few days may have bounced a bit.

I’m hoping it was only a few days, so the valid mail will be retrying and get through. But if you get a bounced bit of email from tnir, now you’ll know why.

Annnd, we’re back

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Well, that took a bit longer than expected.

The stickler was moving from MySQL 4 to MySQL 5.
My mysqldump output had two or three now-syntax-errors-in-v-5.
Fortunately, they were in unimportant databases.
Probably my own fault – I might have named fields poorly, not knowing about reserved words for future releases or something.

Well, all should be good now.
Most of the old sites are up.
Squirrelmail isn’t quite up yet but that shouldn’t take too long.

tnir again, tnir again, jiggety-jig

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it’s that time again, when old hardware starts to fade.
The below is copied from some mail I sent out to people who use tnir.

Poor old tnir is having hardware problems.
The technical description is that it goes beep a lot instead of booting.
Sometimes it takes me three tries to get it running.
Even now, when it seems to be handling internet traffic properly and allows me to log in via ssh, the top â…“ of the Fedora login screen is inexplicably black.
I fear tnir is not long for this world.

I am setting up Michael’s old PC to be a stopgap tnir.
I will use it while I shop for a permanent replacement.
It’s only a stopgap because of the reason it’s Michael’s *old* PC – i.e.,
it turned itself off and for a long time we couldn’t get it to turn on again.
And I have no idea why it was off nor why it is now turning on again.
Thus stopgap.

Tnir is a venerable old 700 MHz Pentium II machine, so it’s about time it got replaced.
Also, I’ve been meaning to replace Fedora Core 3 with a more modern Ubuntu Server.
I hope the new hardware will have dual ethernet on the motherboard
(it was always a pain in previous tnir incarnations to have two ethernet cards),
a relatively fast CPU (say a 1.8 GHz Core Duo),
and lots of disk space – I have a 160 GB drive available that will be replacing the current 80 GB drive,
which is roughly 70% full.

Craig @ Toronto International Film Festival

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It’s that time of year again, and I am updating
the filmfest site
with Craig’s doings.
This year Craig has
an official sponsor/job,
posting his blog entries to canada.com.
Cool!

I will be posting his reviews to tnir as well, and we’ve also got Craig’s calendar for you
to subscribe to, in either iCal
or iCalendar format.
(The only difference is that the first link will automatically start iCal and subscribe,
while the second link is for copying and pasting into your calendar program (which also works in iCal, but the first link is easier!)