prince.org staff blog

Sorry for the downtime today — had to try and repair a piece of the database. While I was at it, I upgraded some other bits and pieces of the system software, which required a reboot… but we seem to be all back and happy now. Let me know if you see something amiss!

The org decided it needed a little nap this morning. Ok, well, actually, I upgraded some parts of the server software to keep up on the security and maintenance, and it borked the webserver such that it wouldn’t restart. I apologize, and all has been rectified now.

I’m going to take another shot at moving the .org to the faster server over the holiday, probably starting Sunday night. Expect some downtime! You’ve been warned

Thanks for your understanding!

Ben

Sorry, as usual, I forgot to take the necessary steps to ensure the chat would keep working on January 1st… I think this is the 5th year in a row that I’ve managed to neglect that! Sorry, it’s all working again now, and thanks very much to luv4u for reminding me!So, aside from that minor glitch, I certainly hope everyone is having a joyous New Year! Personally, 2008 wasn’t a bad year for me — but certainly was tough for a lot of folks. I’m definitely hoping it improves for everyone in ‘09; fingers crossed!Ben 

Sorry for the unavailability this morning — turns out I (d’oh!) didn’t update the credit card on file at the hosting provider and they turned off the traffic. All fixed, paid in full, happiness again  

Whew. That was fun (not!)

My apologies for our outage for the last 5 days. Not that it was my fault, but I still feel bad about it. I know many of you have missed your “org fix” as one person wrote to me in email. In case you didn’t get the mail I sent out (some people seem not to have — reminder, check the email address the org has on file for you!), we were down starting last Saturday night, due to an electrical fire and subsuquent explosion (!) where our servers are hosted, in Texas, at theplanet.com. This was a catastrophic failure for their power systems, and while things like a normal power cut, would not have caused any problem, an explosion destroying much of their underground wiring, certainly did Over 9,000 servers were affected, approximately 7,000 customers, including, of course, our beloved org. Fortunately, no one was hurt in the fire and explosion!

The folks at theplanet.com worked round the clock for days to restore power, and finally restored it to all the servers about a day ago. The org wouldn’t come right back up, however, and after some manual intervention on their part, we were able to return to service about 6 hours ago. My thanks to the good folks at The Planet, and I really appreciate everyone’s patience while we waited for them to slog through the repairs. It’s great to be back!!

Two months ago when I started working on moving us to a new server, I had hoped to have everything done within a week. I spent about a week’s worth of effort on getting everything set up and installed, etc., and still wasn’t ready for the crucial last set of steps to actually move the entire site over. I’m going to be working on that some more this week, hopefully even tonight, and try to get us onto the faster equipment by the end of May.

Please understand if the site is down for a while, and it may also take time for your ISP to update their DNS cache (i.e., to point to the new site’s address). Best case, that takes only a few minutes, but worst case, a couple of days.

Anyhow, I’ll try to have meaningful messages posted up on the old site as I make progress.

Ben

All:
Sometime Sunday night (I’m not exactly sure when I’ll get around to this, but probably after 9PM Pacific time), I will be taking the org down for a little while for database maintenance, and one of the critical steps towards moving the site to new (faster!) server.  I expect the downtime to only be about an hour. I will try to have a “maintenance” page up during the process, as well.

If all goes well, within a week or so we should be all migrated to the new machine, however, which I think will be a noticeable speed improvement, so it’s all for a good cause!

Thanks for your understanding,
Ben

Wow, interesting. So PrinceFansUnited (prince.org, PrinceFams, and Housequake) put up a site to express our displeasure with what we interpreted as legal bullying. The press latched on to the story (without our prompting) and gave it a lot of (mostly virtual) ink, predominantly negative toward Prince. Today we find out that Prince would like to engage us in more civil talks, oh and also, he has created a ‘response’ song. He even wants us to host the song on our protest site (yes, we thought it was weird, too.) And then he registers a domain very similar to ours (princefamsunited.com) and puts the song there with no explanation.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the song is funky as hell, probably one of the best tracks in recent years. but… it sounds like the lyrics might be trying to dis us.

So… is he trying to end hostilities, or take it to the next level? Who knows, this is Prince we’re dealing with. Obviously, the end to this story hasn’t been written yet… although we do seem to be proving the theory that his greatest music comes from being pissed off!

Hi guys, while dealing with the various issues around WebSheriff etc., I came across this pretty interesting article from last weekend’s Washington Post… check it out! http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/18/AR2007101802453.html

Here’s a small excerpt–but there is much more in the full article:

But recently — in part because of backlash among users and advocacy groups who say copyright holders are abusing the law and wrongfully taking down content — the challenges to these copyright claims also appear to be increasing.

“These companies are trying to shoot a mouse with an elephant gun,” said Gigi Sohn, director of Public Knowledge, a public-policy think tank that focuses on intellectual property. “They like to accuse their customers, the music fans and TV fans out there, of not respecting the law, but I don’t think they respect the law.”

We feel the same way, especially with the sloppiness of WebSheriff’s slapdash and ridiculously broad DMCA request. I hadn’t thought of actually suing them over it, but now that I see some folks are going for it, it’s something to consider. Interesting stuff!