29 August 2013: Planned Site Migration (Final) UPDATE 4

computer_repair[UPDATE 4] 2:30 PM 30 August: Fairpoint DNS servers are now updated. I’m glad to be able to put this migration behind me. We’re on a new “virtual machine” server with half a dozen other relatively low-volume sites with plenty of server resources to go around including gobs of disk space. Moving on…

[UPDATE 3] 7:10 AM 30 August: The Fairpoint DNS issue continues. There were some other sites involved in last night’s move and none of them are accessible to people  using Fairpoint DNS servers. In other words, Fairpoint customers more than likely can’t get to this site yet. That is outrageous. I’ll be filing a ticket with Fairpoint later. At first it looked like one Fairpoint server was working- NS2. However it has not fully updated either so I’ve set my own servers to Google’s public DNS servers 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.

[UPDATE 2] 9:55 pm 29 August: It appears the DNS problem was/is limited to Fairpoint customers as a result of two misconfigured name servers NS1.MYFAIRPOINT.NET and NS3.MYFAIRPOINT.NET which are failing to respond properly. I solved the problem on my network by manually setting the primary DNS  server to NS2.MYFAIRPOINT.NET which is responding properly. The TTL (time to live) on Fairpoint DSL name servers is set to 19 hours which is a bit outrageous. I’ll be speaking to them. If this sounds like so much gibberish and you’re reading it, don’t worry about it. If you found Clarylake.org was unavailable for a day and then suddenly started working, that’s why. Sorry for any inconvenience.

[UPDATE 1] 9:03 PM 30 August: The migration has taken place but there are some residual DNS problems resulting from poorly configured servers most notably with Fairpoint. This is making the site unavailable to some users. Most notably, this is affecting ME so I’m on a proxy now. Patience folks.

Back on the 18th of August I posted about a plan to migrate this website to a new server. I thought this would have taken place by now but it turned out to be a little more involved as there are a number of other sites that share the same virtual machine and they all needed special attention. Anyways, the transition plan has been refined and tested and we’re ready to implement it. Theoretically nobody should notice a thing as the cut-over will take place late tonight when traffic is particularly slow, and it should only involve a few minutes of downtime. There may be a short period when the domain name clarylake.org doesn’t resolve properly. If you get a “Non-existent domain” or “page not found” error you may need to clear your browser cache, close and reopen your browser, or just try again later. Long before tomorrow morning arrives we’ll be back fully operational.