S J Birkill
MV Administrator
just a sensible reserve
Posts: 861
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archive.clivejames.com outage
« : 15.06.24 at 07:37 » |
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The Clive James Web Archive site has had something of a rough ride over the past couple of weeks. At the end of May our entire Dreamhost account was moved to a brand new shared server. All seemed to work seamlessly -- in particular Smash Flops and Midnight Voices don't appear to have been adversely affected by the move.
However we (well, I) overlooked one thing, which only became apparent when the old server was taken off line a few days later: the new server was on a new IP address and we'd neglected to change the DNS record at clivejames.com (which is managed independently) to point the 'archive' subdomain to the new address. Page requests were being answered with an "ain't 'ere, gov" error message and warnings about fraudulent redirection.
After a couple of days' panic we got through to the appropriate parties and were able to make the necessary changes. But our problems weren't over.
It became apparent that some Web browser and operating system combinations were failing to connect to the 'fast-track' versions of archive pages, instead returning a '404' (file not found) error. Some would show a flash of the '404' before the requested page loaded, and yet others worked as normal. This appears to have been caused by a critical timing error when loading fresh content (the so-called 'AJAX' method) into the browser document. The prototype pages (landing from off-site links) loaded normally.
Fortunately this was fixable by modifying each Section's (Essays, Poetry, Books etc.) base file -- I didn't need to change all of the archive's 2600-odd pages! As of this evening (Friday June 14th) all appears to be functional. Sorry for the outage!
Steve
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