So Far, So Good . . . So Far

The blog has been up for over 24 hours with nary a bobble, so I’m hoping the problem is fixed once and for all. But I’ve still got my fingers crossed.

I do want to thank everyone for the many comments, suggestions, and patience. In a way I did enjoy the ‘vacation’ for doing a daily blog, but I also missed doing it.

Strange.

And to repeat what I posted on Facebook, the reports of my death were greatly exaggerated. Apparently several readers called our friend Nick Russell with condolences on my death, which to them was why my blog was pretty much gone.

And In fact, Nick even did a blog about three different times he was assumed dead, one of which his wife Terry was sent to the hospital to identify his body. You can read about it here. Greg Says He’s Still Alive

Over the next few days I’ll try to play catch-up on all our comings and goings over the last almost 3 weeks.

To recap, the blog started going up and doing early on the morning of December 23rd. Sometimes it would be up for a few minutes and then down for 30 minutes, then up for 15 minutes and down for 5.

It was completely random.

Our RV Advenutes LOGO 4

When I called that day I was told it was a ‘server’ problem and they were working on it. OK, so no problem. When I called back on the 24th, same answer. However I did learn something that explains a lot in past calls.

Apparently Godaddy techs look at the servers through some sort of internal connection and not from the ‘outside’ world like everyone else does. So when I would call they would say the blog was working fine.when my monitoring service, UptimeRobot, said it was down. Usually I would tell the tech to either look at it on his phone, or use ShotSherpa.com to view the site, and then I’d get an, “Oh. You’re right.”

I didn’t even try calling on the 25th. Pretty much any tech who was so low on the totem pole that he got stuck working on Christmas, wouldn’t be worth talking to.

But on the 26th, my ‘problem’ was no longer a server issue. Suddenly my blog was ‘out of date’, and that was causing the problem. However they couldn’t explain how my blog was going ‘in’ and ‘out of date’ every few minutes.

And they also couldn’t explain why when they were looking at it on their internal line, it also worked fine. But they were just sure that outdated themes, plugins, and widgets were the problem.

Yeah, right.

Finally I got a tech who did enough research to track down the real problem’ the server was ‘under mitigation’. This apparently means that the server is under some sort of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack.

This means that some sort of ‘bot’ network, or ‘botnet’ was attacking the server with 10’s of thousands, or even 100’s of thousands of rogue computes, so overloading the server that it just can’t respond to access requests. And since this is a ‘shared’ server with 100’s or even 1000’s of websites on it, the attack on one site takes them all down.

That’s about it for today. I’ll continue on with the rest of this saga tomorrow.

Just a note. As it stands right now there are no blog posts being emailed out. Due to the server move, I’ll have to set that up all over again.

Thought for the Day: 

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”  – Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, 2002

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