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.

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…”

For those that were on the older forums “AFN” & “SFSN” may have wondered where I hang out or where some of those regulars are. Well you can catch us over on http://sternnation.com.

For others that have no idea what I am talking about. There are many Stern show related forums, course many are either too paranoid to discuss certain topics or have made certain topics and discussions “taboo” and have banned any discussion they feel makes them look bad. Of course admins can run their sites any way they wish. But I for one only hang out on forums where moderation is usually used to clean up spammers and everything else goes, for the most part.

So for those who were part of the “AFN” & “SFSN” crowd or are just looking for a forum that is less strict then I recommend checking out http://sternnation.com a place where show fans, show haters, any fan of talk radio, or none of the above can just enjoy a place to post about anything and all have a place to hangout.

http://www.sternnation.com