“Couldn’t write to: /var/www/vhosts/badastronomy.com/httpdocs/bablog/wp-content/cache/wp-cache-c4523ff689e59b577ba1f8009a01bf52.html”

It happens with both Firefox and Internet Exploder. Of course, during the day I’m behind a corporate firewall, which could be an issue. However, I also read your blog at home, and it too sometimes hangs.

If I can see any more error messages, I’ll let you know.

lookupd -flushcache

“It’s BSD Unix based with a kernal called, appropriately enough for this blog, Darwin.”

Kernel is mach, BSD “distro” is Darwin, but who’s keeping track.

Phil and I wanted to see how well it would withstand a Digg, and we got it last night. Of course, we didn’t expect his biggest Digg ever with the Mythbusters post. It was like hoping for a breeze to test your kite and getting a hurricane.

The server went through the load perfectly. No slowdown at any time, even though there were many, many simultaneous users.

It’s funny how technical you have to be to just run a successful blog. There’s no way we could afford to run our sites these days if we weren’t able to manage them ourselves.

“However (Warning: tech geekery ahoy!) to move a site to a different location you have to let all the computers on the planet know it. We updated the Domain Name Servers, but that takes a few hours sometimes to propagate throughout the web.”

A little more “tech geekery”. The maximum time a change in a DNS record should take to propagate through the Internet is the TTL (Time To Live) value of the old DNS record. Name servers typically cache DNS records for the TTL period before looking up the record again.

Because of this, when it is known in advance that a DNS record will be changed, the owner of the DNS record will lower the normal TTL of the record sometime in advance before making the change. Thus when the change is made, it propagates known more quickly. Of course this lowering is not always possible.

Playing games:

[xxxxxx:~] xxxxxx% dig http://www.badastronomy.com

; <> DiG 9.4.1-P1 <> http://www.badastronomy.com
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 918
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 2

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.badastronomy.com. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
http://www.badastronomy.com. 68037 IN A 67.228.209.248

The value 68037 is the current timeout value, in seconds, in the cache of the local name server, decrementing from the time it last looked up http://www.badastronomy.com. A short time later:

;; ANSWER SECTION:
http://www.badastronomy.com. 67950 IN A 67.228.209.248

Given the value above, I would guess the TTL for http://www.badastronomy.com ‘is 86400 seconds, or one day.

George

It’s BSD Unix based with a kernal called, appropriately enough for this blog, Darwin.

The mascot is Hexley, a platypus.

with a pretty hood and no easy way to tinker with the engine?

Apple releases the kernal under the Apple Public Source License which has the approval of the Free Software Foundation as a free software license.

Releases available here:
http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/

The “pretty hood” is Aqua and *that* part is proprietray, but you can run X11 with Darwin.

Now if only we could get that “preview” button…

“Preview is your friend.” Ooh, I like that!

@ Celtic_Evolution:

Thanks, that rings a bell – well, I don’t think I have seen the WINS resolution before – maybe I used the GUI instead, or didn’t need to. I typically learn what I need – gotta make haste. (And forget it a few years later, it seems. )

Um, isn’t ol’ Mac unix based now? Roughly Linux with a pretty hood and no easy way to tinker with the engine? (I haven’t seen a Mac in years. Not popular around hardware construction, it seems.) Not much to get dirty on then.

But that’s because I’m a computer geek. I heard that ruby is optimized enough that it can take the worst /. and dig can throw at it, on an OLD computer, and not even blink.

Is it a LAMP server? WAMP? SAMP? LAR, WAR or SAR?

Part of the reason I want to know is so I can make better recomendations other than LAMP (linux apache mysql perl (in this case the p is perl)) for the new ones I have to build at work.

In the Windows world, there are several commands to help clear out your resolve caches…

nbtstat -R clears out the netbios cache.

nbtstat -RR does the same but sends WINS relase packets out to update changes for WINS.

ipconfig /flushdns clears the DNS cache.

Have no idea what you would do for the same issues in the ol’ Mac world. I try not to get my hands dirty with that stuff.

Nevermind. I guess you’ll soon get the 10 millionth hit.