Okay, the cleanup of the MuNu DNS is now complete. This required the editing of 183 files and several restarts of the DNS server. Thank Bourne for shell scripts... Our DNS is more complicated than you might think because mu.nu is not just a name server, but a domain in its own right and a domain registry as well, and this doesn't sit well with CPanel. (On the old box, I had things set up so that everything was just dumped into one file, which worked suprisingly well, but CPanel doesn't allow me to do that.)

As always, it will take a few hours for these changes to make themselves known right across the world. Once they do, no-one should have any trouble getting to any MuNu site, unless the entire server is down.

If you do have a problem (which won't happen), try again without the www in front. Or if you didn't have the www in front, try it with that. In any case, let me know, because I really, really, want to make sure this is fixed.

Oh, and let me know exactly what URL you were using when the problem happened. I really really need to know this.

Thanks everyone!

P.S. I'll be setting up MT 3.1 and EE 1.1 this weekend for people to play with. If anyone has any other toys they'd like to see installed, this is a good time to let me know.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:46 AM | Comments (85) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Have you thought of including WordPress as one of the platform options? What ever happened to Minx? *ducking*

Posted by: Linda @ at September 01, 2004 02:25 PM

2 i had to change my bookmark from www.annika.mu.nu, which didn't work, to http://annika.mu.nu, which worked fine.

Posted by: annika @ at September 01, 2004 04:58 PM

3 Linda: I think WordPress is available via the cPanel/Fantastico functions... I think...

Posted by: Madfish Willie @ at September 01, 2004 05:22 PM

4 How about the comments notify emaily widget?

Posted by: Jim @ at September 01, 2004 08:27 PM

5 That's included in the MT 3.1 plugin pack, but I can look at installing it for MT 2.6 if you like.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at September 01, 2004 08:49 PM

6 How about taking the opportunity to rename the comments script while you're in there?

Posted by: Light & Dark @ at September 01, 2004 10:02 PM

7 Wow...you're right, MW. Has anyone here ever used it? Why or why not?

Posted by: Linda @ at September 02, 2004 12:26 AM

8 Paul: Just curious... why do you want to rename the comments script?

Posted by: Madfish Willie @ at September 02, 2004 01:13 AM

9 I still can't access Primal Purge. See my detailed post a few posts down.

Posted by: Gir @ at September 02, 2004 01:31 AM

10 Gir - detailed post where? Confused.

MW - Spam prevention measure.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at September 02, 2004 03:58 AM

11 Gir - P.S. Primal Purge works for me.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at September 02, 2004 03:58 AM

12 Pixy: When I try to login to post to my site, I get the screen with all my access; when I click any of the options to go to a site, it kicks me back out to the login screen again in an endless loop of futility...

Posted by: Madfish Willie @ at September 02, 2004 09:06 AM

13 Madfish:

Because all default installs of MT have the same name for that script, spammers can search for the script by name and just hammer on it. It's an instant and extremely automated way to force spam on a blog. With a unique name, that whole method (one of the main ones spammers use) evaporates.

Many people who've changed it report that spam has virtually disappeared. There's even a built in tool in MT to do it, so I suspect Six Apart saw the importance of it too. In fact, Typepad doesn't even have the script. Comments are linked to the individual archives, which can also be done in MT to get around being hammered by bots. Emma at Miss Apropos is set up that way, as are Pixy and a number of others.

Also, Pixy? What about tweaking to widen the text entry area in the posting window? I seem to remember others had been interested in that a while ago. I've got the info on how to do it here somewhere if you want it.

Paul

Posted by: Light & Dark @ at September 02, 2004 09:27 AM

14 What did ever happen to Minx?

As I understand MT3.1 it comes with several add-in scripts including a new improved Blacklist, email notification and other stuff. The plugins details are here.

Posted by: Simon @ at September 02, 2004 12:01 PM

15 Pixy, the detailed post is here:
http://munuviana.mu.nu/archives/042243.php

Posted by: Gir @ at September 03, 2004 03:00 AM

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During the night I received over 200 SPAM comments from this fuck at http://www.x-pictures.net/ on a range of IP addresses. Can anyone help block him on MT list or whatever?

Posted by: Everydaystranger at 07:32 AM | Comments (74) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

My blog, Blogo Slovo, won't load. I am hosting the Carnival of the Vanities and I can't get the blog to load. Help!

Posted by: Dave at 03:42 AM | Comments (76) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1

It works fine for me, and the DNS check comes up fine as well. Anyone else?

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at September 01, 2004 08:59 AM

2 Looking good for me too.

Posted by: Jim @ at September 01, 2004 08:18 PM

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This is Dave from BlogoSlovo. I am supposed to host the Carnival of the Vanities tomorrow, I am typing from my parents' house, and my site won't come up on the browser, but everyone else from MuNu land seems fine. Is something wrong? Did I fail to pay my bill or blow my bandwidth?

Posted by: Dave at 03:25 AM | Comments (69) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Jim at Snoozebutton Dreams has some bad news.

Give him a hand if you can. When you get to his site, read the news then, scroll down to his paypal button, if he hasn't moved it up yet like I asked him to.

Update: He's moved it to near the top of his blog.

Posted by: spacemonkey at 04:03 PM | Comments (64) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

After appearing okay for a bit this morning, I'm back to getting a "Host Not Found" message when trying to dial up the Llama Shop. Apparently, some other folks are not having any problems.

-Robert the Llama Butcher

Posted by: Robert at 03:55 PM | Comments (67) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1

I'm taking another look at it. It's working fine for me.

Exactly what URL are you using? Just so I can check.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at August 31, 2004 11:41 PM

2 Oh, and http://www.squish.net/dnscheck/ is very very useful for checking this sort of problem. (You want to find a type A (host name) record.) But it's coming up squeaky clean right now.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at August 31, 2004 11:44 PM

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(also posted on Rocket Jones)

In part one we saw how easy it is to create a PDA compatible version of your blog. It only takes a few minutes, and once complete you don’t have to do anything special, because it updates automatically every time you post.

In this part, I’ll go over the steps needed to download your blog (or other PDA friendly web content) into your PDA. It’s pretty easy too.

(in the extended entry)

Posted by: Ted at 12:49 PM | Comments (81) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Alright, Ted. You convinced me. My PDA version is available at http://dfmoore.mu.nu/pda.php

Posted by: Daniel @ at August 31, 2004 04:58 PM

2 Thanks again, Rocket Ted. I've added this post to Useful Thingys as well!

Posted by: Madfish Willie @ at August 31, 2004 05:53 PM

3 Ted, are you suggesting that the Ministry actually work on something, rather than just hope that the need passes?

Posted by: buckethead @ at September 03, 2004 06:24 AM

4 OBE, the favorite acronym of Ministries everywhere.

Posted by: Ted @ at September 03, 2004 11:02 AM

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Looks like I need to edit all 200 of our DNS zone files before the drama is completely resolved.

The secret to reliable DNS: Never rely on anyone else's DNS server. Once I've finished the cleanup, all mu.nu DNS will be handled by the Munuserver and only by the Munuserver.

Of course, this means that if you can't reach the Munuserver, you won't be able to lookup domain names at mu.nu. But since all the mu.nu domains are on the Munuserver anyway, and if you can't reach the Munuserver you can't reach anything, this probably doesn't matter very much.

It's 3 A.M. so I'm not going to do this right now. If you have any problems reaching a mu.nu site, give me a yell, otherwise I will do this sometime tomorrow.

Oh!

If you have a non-munu domain hosted here, at your convenience, set the delegation to:

Primary: mica.mu.nu 64.91.238.2
Secondary: ns.mu.nu 64.91.238.3

Though you might want to wait until I finish cleaning up.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:17 PM | Comments (70) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 I just tried 20 munu blogs and they all came up fine, so it can't be too badly screwed up.

See you in the morning.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at August 30, 2004 06:29 PM

2 Sorry to cause trouble! I still can't pull up our site and a couple others, but apparently some folks can. Surely we can wait til tomorrow to get it fixed. Thanks!

Posted by: Robert the Llama Butcher @ at August 30, 2004 08:30 PM

3 I couldn't buy a butchered llama when I tried to drop by the shop. I found the door to still be locked up with a generic 404 lock.

Posted by: Tiger @ at August 31, 2004 12:41 AM

4 Did it actually come back with a 404, or did it give you a "host not found" or something like that?

It's working for me, and DNS is much happier today, but it could take a little while longer for the change to propagate.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at August 31, 2004 12:44 AM

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Open posting at Snooze Button Dreams today.

The best posts will win points, too. How's that for sweet?

Posted by: Jim at 01:58 PM | Comments (66) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

What's going on? I'm being told that our server has vanished! All that raw llama meat is going bad and I can't get into the shop! Have the Thought Police finally caught up with Pixy?

Robert the Llama Butcher

Posted by: Robert at 01:19 PM | Comments (79) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

(also posted on Rocket Jones)

If you don't recognize the term, PDA stands for Personal Digital Assistant, and refers to that group of handheld devices like the Palm Pilot, the iPAQ Pocket PC, Blackberry and many others. Basically, they're PC's that fit into your pocket. I recently got one, and love it to death.

Why in the world would you want to do a PDA-friendly version of your blog? Well, some of us out in the world are techno-junkies (not me) and some of us just don't have time to surf to all the places we'd like to each and every day (uh, that would be me). So by downloading your blog to our PDA's every day or two, we can benefit from your wisdom and insight whenever we have a moment or two to spare.

First I'll explain the steps to make your blog PDA friendly, then in part two I'll show those who have PDA's how to get this great blog content downloaded to your wee beastie. It's all in the extended entry.

Posted by: Ted at 12:33 PM | Comments (77) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Grrr!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:37 AM | Comments (72) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Is there a bear in there?

Posted by: Simon @ at August 30, 2004 09:46 AM

2 So call Microsoft and tell them to recognize us

Posted by: Susie @ at August 30, 2004 06:15 PM

3 not surprising though, two letter domains are not valid syntax according to the original http URI spec - has to be 3 or more see...

Posted by: Rob @ at August 31, 2004 10:05 AM

4 Original URI spec r pu tu then.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at September 01, 2004 12:36 AM

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Hi everyone! Welcome to my first biquadrennial State of the Munion Address.

In the past eight months, we have grown from a small community of thirty blogs and a forum sending out thirty gigabytes a month, to a not-so-small community of over a hundred blogs and three forums sending out two hundred gigabytes a month. Opening our doors in April was such a huge success that I haven't entirely recovered from it yet.

Moving forward, I plan to offer three new options to Munuvian bloggers:

First, Movable Type 3.1, which is expected to be released as early as this week. This offers a few nice new features such as dynamic page generation and scheduled posting (like Trickle), and comes with several neat plugins as standard, including the new MT Blacklist and a cross-blog posting thingy. MT's new pricing means that this will only cost us $100 for the whole of MuNu.

Second, Expression Engine 1.1. Thanks to the generosity of the people at PMachine, we have a free unlimited user license, and I'll be providing this as an option. Expression Engine is fully dynamic, which makes posting and commenting faster than with MT, but page generation slightly slower. It's a more flexible and general-purpose package that should please some of our power-bloggers.

Third, I have installed a blogging package in the MuNu forum system. The advantage of this is that it is tightly integrated with the forums - and also that users can create blogs themselves without my intervention. The disadvantages are that it isn't as flexible as MT or EE, and it doesn't directly support individual domains. I don't expect any of the existing bloggers to use it (though you are welcome to try it out), but some of the forum Munuvians have expressed interest.

All of these options will be available within the next couple of weeks (assuming MT 3.1 is released on schedule). However, no-one is required to move at all - I'll keep MT 2.6 up and running until nobody wants it any more.

Exactly how we move is still up in the air. I'll start by setting up two test systems so that people can play around a bit. One of the issues is maintaining permalinks; I'm not sure how this is going to work. We have probably the biggest and most complicated MT installation in the world, so it might take a bit of fiddling.

I'm pretty sure I can maintain an integrated "New at MuNu" list. Certainly this can be done between MT 2.6 and 3.1; I'll need to play around with EE a bit to make sure of that as well.

As some of you have already noticed, I've been doing a lot of work over the past few weeks on the forum side of MuNu. I've installed a new package, MX-System, which integrates closely with the forum software, phpBB, and provides a lot of new functionality. Cribbing from my post on the forums, I've added the following goodies already:

Cash
Attachments
Photo album
Music
Games
Portal
Shoutbox
Basic chat
Enhanced site statistics
RSS Feeds
HTML entities ∀ℑŠ‡‰€

And I have the following goodies installed and in testing:

Pets
Shops
Lottery
Bank
Stock market
Staff list
Calendar
Meetings
News
Blogs
Knowledge base
Mods database (this is just a little thingy that tells you what goodies I've installed)
Web links
Downloads

Because it's so flexible, I've decided to use it as the system for the MuNu home page. Try it out, particularly if you're not an Internet Explorer victim. (Due to a long-standing bug, IE does not like MuNu cookies. This doesn't affect MuNu subdomains, just the main MuNu domain itself. I'm trying to work around this, but haven't quite solved the problem yet.)

As you can see, the main page provides links to all the MuNu blogs and forums. Over time, I'd like to drive traffic to the MuNu portal and then out to all the munuvian sites. I've got various ideas on how to do this, including a regular Carnival of the Munuvians, which I'd like to start next week. (This week is my busy week at work.) Email me by next Monday with your best recent post, and I'll feature you all on the MuNu home page. I'm not sure yet how often we'll run it, but we'll try it and see.

Beyond that... Well, as I mentioned, we are now generating 200GB of traffic a month; easily a couple of million pages. (I tried to track this with a MuNu counter but it choked and died.) This is 40% of our available monthly bandwidth, so we have room to grow for a few more months. I'm looking at migrating us to a bigger and more powerful server with more bandwidth, but naturally this will cost more. Fortunately, prices are coming down all the time, so by the time we really need it it might not cost much more at all. I'm keeping an eye on pricing; I'd like to stay with out current hosting provider if I can get a good deal.

From next week I should be more available for setting up new Munuvians, so if people would like to get the ball rolling again in Ellis Island, I'll be along shortly. It's great to see people actually seeking us out and asking to become Munuvians, and it reflects well on all of you. Even Harvey.

Oh, and the t-shirts should be ready sometime around Christmas...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:52 AM | Comments (116) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

I've just added "home" and "html" to the Blacklist. I've been peppered with nonsense comments, presumably by a bot.

The only thing they had in common was the urls were in this format:
homexxxxxxxxx.com
htmlxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.com

Where the Xes were random crap. I'm assuming this was happening at other blogs too?

We'll need to remove them from the Blacklist tomorrow or in a couple days. Whenever this fucktard gets bored and quits or modifies his bot.

Posted by: Jim at 02:23 AM | Comments (94) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Aha. So THIS is what it looks like in here! Hi everyone

*does a little munuby dance*

Thanks so much Pixy! So good to be blogenabled once again .

Posted by: goldie at 10:36 PM | Comments (75) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Wasn't there a post here about munubies I was supposed to set up? I can't find it anymore!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:22 AM | Comments (75) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 I think I've got everyone anyway. Just finalising the setups.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at August 29, 2004 12:56 PM

2 You forgot one...I'll email you.

Posted by: Linda @ at August 29, 2004 02:36 PM

3 And one other. I emailed you.

Posted by: Jim @ at August 29, 2004 03:26 PM

4 Two more added.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at August 29, 2004 05:03 PM

5 Files for php includes are updated.

Posted by: Madfish Willie @ at August 29, 2004 11:41 PM

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In case anyone else is in the habit of using the two letter abbreviations for munu sites (pp.mu.nu, jl.mu.nu, etc.) I thought I should mention that they are currently (as of this posting) wonky--browsing to the shortcut url is a step into the wayback machine to Feb. 20th, 2004.....

<Bill Murray's voice from Ghostbusters>Pixy? What did you DO, Pixy?</Bill Murray's voice>

Posted by: Susie at 08:41 PM | Comments (90) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Well, at least I had content back then. ;-)

Posted by: Jennifer @ at August 28, 2004 09:28 PM

2 The word is wonky? I was deceived, 'cause Jim tol' me the word was horky, or at least I think it was Jim. It might have been Mickey.

Posted by: Tiger @ at August 28, 2004 09:51 PM

3 Talk about wonky. I just clicked the link under Susie in the post and was transported to this page where the last post is from June 27, 2003.

Posted by: Kang A. Roo @ at August 28, 2004 10:26 PM

4 I took the old server out of the DNS lookups. The tech guys at nunames.nu must have screwed something up.

But it seems to be happy again now.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at August 29, 2004 02:22 AM

5 It may be happy, but it's still pointing pp.mu.nu to the Feb 20th page....

Posted by: Susie @ at August 29, 2004 06:50 AM

6 Tiger--that WAS wierd....don't know how that got there, but I changed my profile and it should be fixed now...

Posted by: Susie @ at August 29, 2004 06:54 AM

7

It will fix itself! Really! Stupid DNS.

Moo.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at August 29, 2004 08:30 AM

8 Oops. Or maybe I'll fix it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at August 29, 2004 08:31 AM

9 Okay, I've double-re-fixed it, but it may take a couple of hours for the first fix to take effect world-wide.

I'll go back to creating munubies now.

(P.S. Stupid DNS! Bah!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at August 29, 2004 08:38 AM

10 Just commenting to see if it's been a couple hours yet, or if I need to change my homepage (and my url in comment boxes across the blogosphere....)

Posted by: Susie @ at August 29, 2004 03:54 PM

11 Hmmm..does 7 hours qualify as a couple? Pixy, I think you need to fire your tech guys

Posted by: Susie @ at August 29, 2004 03:59 PM

12 Woogy. That's retarded. Let me hit some things with some rocks...

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at August 29, 2004 05:06 PM

13 Okay, there was further wackiness with just three of the domains: pp.mu.nu (you), jl.mu.nu (Jen) and ai.mu.nu (me). Dunno why, but they've been stomped.

Again, it could take a couple (equals 4, in this case) of hours to propagate across the world.

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at August 29, 2004 05:11 PM

14 Yay! I'm fixed! Thank you! (gotta love that percussive maintenance!)

Posted by: Susie @ at August 30, 2004 06:34 AM

15

There is now only one reference server for DNS, and the two backup servers are automatically updated from it, so this should never happen again. (Ha ha!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa @ at August 30, 2004 07:16 AM

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Okay. I did a search and couldn't find it. I'll bet this was addressed last week, though, while I was off doing other things.

But here's my question--

How do I customize the text that people see when they want to comment on my blog, so that I can articulate a "comments policy" there? I'd like to remind people that they have to play nice. How do I do this?

Posted by: Attila at 07:25 AM | Comments (73) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Is there a way to enable MT tags in the body of a post? No one over at MT forum wants to tackle this one. What I'm thinking about is listing Trackbacks in the text of a single post. Anyone? Bueller?

Posted by: Rusty at 06:54 PM | Comments (73) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Tom mentioned it a few days ago...now it's my turn:

Happy birthday to me...

I have to say a massive thank you to Pixy for saving me from Blogspot and to all the Munu Community for just being, well, Munuvian. I wouldn't be one without you.

Posted by: Simon at 10:07 AM | Comments (72) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 You're just full of good news lately, eh? I love the new design at your place too!

Posted by: Ted @ at August 27, 2004 11:19 AM

2 Damn Simon, that IS cool

Posted by: frinklin @ at August 28, 2004 02:13 AM

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