A Dysfunctional Playground

Update May 18, 2013

http://sternnation.com forums are back online, Mike got everything back up today after the Godaddy screwup. I’ve closed the backup forum for now. See you on the SternNation Forums!

 ”What happened?”

Regarding the outage of the SternNation forums May 15, 16…
Spoke to Mike, there has been a wave of people who have had hosting through GoDaddy have had their sites go down recently. There are posts on the godaddy forums as well as wordpress forums and various others. The reason Godaddy have been telling everyone including Mike of SternNation is “excessive DNS” issues.

Now to take hundreds of sites offline for this particular reason is a bit like chopping your toe completely off just because you had an ingrown toe nail. I spoke to Mike via emails and reading everyone’s complaints on other forums what I’ve been able to piece together is the common factor is a runaway sql server. Now those sites that host with Godaddy use Godaddy’s sql servers, and it’s probably a safe bet that the sql servers aren’t all shared. It’s probably all seperate virtual hosts, it’s very possible that the sql servers vhosts are on it’s own machine while the web hosting accounts are on it’s own machine. Anyhow it doesn’t matter how it’s really setup, but from I can piece together the majority of people with issues all ran forums or wordpress/drupal/joomla type sites.

In the case of a forum it could have been set to not disable hostname lookups, which if there were tons of abandoned accounts or lots of incoming traffic that would cause a whole lot of reverse ip dns requests you then combine this with hundreds of other Godaddy hosted forums also set to do hostname lookups, each time those logs or specific sections were accessed it would send a huge spike in dns traffic to Godaddy’s dns servers creating a type of “internal DDOS” in a sense. Blog sites like WordPress and such also have options to turn on hostname lookups or not.

This is my conclusion going on the posts on godaddy forums and wordpress.org forums at least. The annoying part is Godaddy never informed it’s customers of this issue and dropped the sites offline to deal with the problem without telling the customers creating a huge hornet’s nest of angry customers.

Anyhow with that said, Mike will have the sternnation forums back up and running shortly. But until then I tossed up a temporary forum for those looking for news can swing by and check it out until sternnation is back up. I do have registrations tightened down a bit, so when you register it may take a little bit as I have to approve it manually. But don’t fret, it’ll be taken care of as soon as I see it

Update 5/18: Stern Nation Forums are back online! See ya on the forums.

Things have been a bit on the quiet side lately with the site. Although I do try and keep links fixed on some past posts. The Dude Suit Radio station does keep updated and I try to add new tracks every other week, currently in rotation Dude Suit Radio has over 1500 tracks. I myself have been a little under the weather and dealing with some family sickness also. So there haven’t been any new posts lately.

Hopefully things will get back to normal and we’ll see where things go on the site. I was thinking of offering some small services for gamers and/or possible people wanting to run their own radio stations by renting out teamspeak server space and offer shoutcast server rentals. But I’m going to hold off on that for a while for now.

Anyhow if you like Trance, Trip Hop, House music then feel free to enjoy Dude Suit Radio 24/7 stream, just click the ‘click here to listen’ over on the right. Or if on the mobile version of the site just go to the Dude Suit Radio page.

Update (1/20/2013): The site is back up, Mike had been a bit under the weather and didn’t see the domain renewal notice, he renewed and the site is back up now. So come on over if interested in nice place to hang out, uncensored , unfiltered

http://sternnation.com

The Sternnation.com forums are down at the moment. Well the forums are probably up and just fine. The problem is the domain name has expired today 1/17/13.

Don’t know if Mike was aware of the impending renewal fee or that the yearly term was up so soon and the reminder email may have slipped his mind.

I’m just speculating. Anyhow soon as I hear anything I’ll update this post.

I know Mike stays pretty busy, so you usually have a grace period to renew before the domain releases, so if that’s the case once Mike notices it should fire back up once the DNS propagates.

otherwise as they say on old tv serials “Stay Tuned…”

Had a short network outage but all should be back up and running now…Hopefully so that is

Seems like around Jan 7 around that afternoon had a problem with the server but hopefully things should be fixed now “crosses fingers”

Thinking of changing the layout or “theme” around on the site. Not sure if I’ll go with a lighter or stay with the dark theme or 1 to 3 columns and such.

The mobile device theme will stay the same for now so mobile devices will not be affected. But desktop viewers may notice subtle changes or big changes to the look and layout of the site over the next few days. Not exactly sure which way I’ll go or if it’ll be a permanent change just thinking about something new for the new year.

For those that are curious I currently use the ‘Pixel’ theme as it is an older simpler them that hasn’t been updated in a while I’ve been thinking a change is in order. Perhaps I may even work on designing one from scratch. Anyhow leave a comment if you have any tips, ideas, etc, course this site is mainly at the moment a ‘stream of consciousness’ blog of my favorites and ideas with the most popular sections being my Dude Suit Radio streaming server, Stern links, and info for UK users to bypass PirateBay blocks.

If you would like to suggest some ideas feel free to leave a comment. If you happen to enjoy a particular WordPress theme then please drop me a comment with the name of the theme and I’ll definitely check it out. If you’d like to browse the bulk of WordPress themes you can find them here http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/ although there are 3rd party companies that also design and offer free and commercial themes as well. Just curious what people like mainly, lighter background versus darker background, then 1 to 3 columns or perhaps no columns and use seperate pages instead. Let me know what ya think if you feel like it, I’m curious.

Have a Happy New Year!