Hopefully people contacting me thru this site - or commenting on what I have to say - will have a better job of it now!

The scheduled upgrade for 1500hrs today actually happened at 1530 :o But went off without any yet-detected hitches. Sorry for the inconvenience, but a bunch of upgrades couldn't wait any longer :) So we've now been rebooted and should be good for another extended period.

BlakJak.net is blacked out in support of Creative Freedom.

Thanks to a Power Outage which crippled Central Wellington this morning BlakJak.net was unreachable for a couple of hours. The server itself remained on power, thankfully.
Sorry for any inconvenience.

Hosted domains, depending on their Nameserver setup, may have noticed some oddities as both ns1.blakjak.net and ns2.blakjak.net had some broken glue records in the gtld nameservers.
This has been identified and resolved. Sorry if this caused any grief, but most of you likely wont have noticed...

On the subject of DNS records, I used to use 'dnsreport.com' as a useful place to check domain name setups. Since this is now a pay-for service I went hunting for an alternative.
Best one i've found so far is CheckDNS.net. If you know of a better one, i'd love to hear from you...

A quick note. Have just managed to get www.blakjak.net running to let me provide more updates. My coadmin dpa and my good friend Snooker have stepped up and helped heaps - big thanks guys - but the work continues.

At this point people with 'simple' services hosted on the machine may find their stuff is already working.
Those whos content involves active hosting (php) or databases (mysql/postgres) will need to wait a few more days... the new server is a long way from the old one and there's bandwidth limitations to get the data migrated.

The final big hit is the mailing lists I host (mainly the NZOSS) though i'm working on an improvised temporary fix for them while the new lists are built up (which will take some time.) Meanwhile the hard drive containing all our data will be shipped to Wellington.

As i'm heading overseas for work this weekend and will be away for about 9 days, i'm hoping that all will be relatively straightforward and that dpa will have opportunity to restore services during next week for those who remain.

Again my apologies for all the trouble. The new system has been a long time coming and should ultimately put things back to their normal, generally reliable self.

If anything doesn't work, doesn't look right or if you need a particular item hurried along or fixed, please don't hesitate to email me.

Folks may have noticed a services outage this afternoon...
Judginy by the rapidly increasing unreliabiilty of this server i'm going to have to rush through some sort of replacement. I'm guessing my hard drive is probably the root cause here...

Likely there will be further impact to hosted services as we engineer the relocation of 'stuff', so my apologies in advance for any impact. I'll be in touch with each hosted 'client' if there's likely to be any gotchas.

For as yet unconfirmed reasons, the server died during the late afternoon on Sunday PM.
It was restored to service around 6:30pm today - total downtime slightly more than 24 hours.
Sorry for the inconvenience. Work on moving services to a newer box continues...

Working through some kinks in a major drupal version change. In the meantime it looks a bit odd - sorry...

I've decided I need the means to flag articles into more than one category; you will likely see stuff fielded into multiple categories from here on in (plus the odd retrospective tweak.)

In other news,
I'ts been a few days since I did much in the way of blogging.
I'm over in Washington DC at the moment on a work related trip.
It's been a fairly average week - the work aspects have been fine, but the illness i've been dealing with whilst over here hasn't been. :( Some sort of throat infection remains. At least after spending most of a day in bed on Tuesday, i'm a bit better off now...

I've just dropped a couple of fairly interesting subject items into blogs - NZ'rs really need to pay attention to the copyright law situation. Please read on...