Steamlander™

Steamlander will very likely be offline on Sunday, 18 July, 2010 for server maintenance. The target time frame will be noon to 6pm EST (GMT -0500) or around 9AM SLT to 3PM SLT. Best case things will be back up and running in a few minutes to an hour. Worse case it could take *longer* and the site might be offline for as long as 12 hours.

I apologise for any inconvenience this may cause!

Status updates will be available on http://twitter.com/steamlander

I am happy to report that the upgrade glitch which made this interruption necessary proved to be a relatively minor one (we brought our implementation of the popular Apache web server to version 2.2.15 -- the latest version -- but this produced some alarming error messages and the inability to reboot without taking all sites offline...happily it was solved by something as simple as removing some deprecated features from the configuration file). The initial panic that the error messages might have been a symptom of something far more serious had the benefit of forcing me to do a complete backup of the system, and it allowed me to give more thought to emergency recovery plans should it be necessary to move the site to the alternate server. This event has also served to "light a fire under" me in readying the alternate server to go live with some projects that have been simmering on the back burner for some time.

The next portion of tonight's maintenance is troubleshooting the recent upgrade of Steampunk Wiki to the current release of the open source "Media Wiki" package. The upgrade had proven necessary as a step towards integrating the registration and login system with Steamlander, but it also "broke" many features of the wiki. Happily this bit of maintenance work can be performed without taking Steamlander offline.

My thanks to everyone for their patience and understanding while work was underway!

Welcome back to the Aetherwebs, sir! I was feeling deprived of my usual dose of All Things Steamy that is Fit to Print while the site was down.

I was relieved the outage occured when I was Otherwise Occupied
Well done, sir!
World conquest begins when, precisely? I may need a new hat...