WindowsSecrets.Com

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I have been trying to goto WindowsSecrets.Com for the last 3-4 days (even via link at bottom of Wood’s Lounge), after 30-60 seconds of “LOADING” I get status is done with a blank page.

I have tried on 2 different computers (Desktop and notebook) with Firefox and IE8.

Is there aproblem with the site or do I need to check for gremlins ?

Thanks

Edited 0902 CDT Hours 20090703 to correct spelling

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It’s not working for me either.

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It’s not working for me either.

… and I get a time out if I try to ping the site.

Ian

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… and I get a time out if I try to ping the site.

Ian

I don’t know where the site is hosted, but I just saw this posted on Slashdot regarding a major data center outage in Seattle.

Related possibly??

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I can’t reach it either although I did receive their newsletter yesterday.

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The mail server used by WindowsSecrets and the Lounge is separate from the respective sites themselves, as far as I know.

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The mail server used by WindowsSecrets and the Lounge is separate from the respective sites themselves, as far as I know.

I performed a Whois search HERE which shows the website IP location is in Washington DC.

Still out so far – I to have received the newsletters.

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http://www.adhost.com/blog/2009/07/03/fish…st-power-event/
Seems we’re hosted in that particular facility: that would be Seattle WA (PDT/GMT-7) not Washington DC
They say it should be another couple hours (from now), but then they also said it would probably be back by 1pm (that was >4 hours ago).

Our server guy (Tony) mentioned getting a temporary site up with a simple maintenance-style message but I haven’t heard if/how that’s coming along.

July 4 @ 3:30am: Seems we’ve got power back, but because of how we set up the maintenance page it’ll still be a bit before WindowsSecrets.com is back to normal. (why? because Tony’s asleep right now, silly… just like I should be)

The mail server used by WindowsSecrets and the Lounge is separate from the respective sites themselves, as far as I know.

I’m not too sure about that… I think we might be routing Lounge mail through our servers. Well, I’m pretty sure we were doing that at one point, but we may have changed the configuration since then.

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I’m not to sure about that… I think we might be routing Lounge mail through our servers.

OK, thanks for the heads up.

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OK, thanks for the heads up.

Okay, I just checked: we’re both right.

Lounge mail is being sent through our servers, but it’s our mail server – which is quite separate from our web server. Mail here should be working perfectly fine.

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Still out of contact at this time…

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Say, where are all these Loungers who have a Fourth of July date on their posts? (I never could figure out the dating system for email and such things.)

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Say, where are all these Loungers who have a Fourth of July date on their posts? (I never could figure out the dating system for email and such things.)

It seems to me that if YOU have your profile set for the correct time, you should be seeing posts (date and time) in YOUR time zone, in spite of the fact that it’s already 4 July in some parts of the world. Can you give me an example of a post?

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It seems to me that if YOU have your profile set for the correct time, you should be seeing posts (date and time) in YOUR time zone, in spite of the fact that it’s already 4 July in some parts of the world. Can you give me an example of a post?

That is most embarrassing.
I haven’t the faintest idea where I SET the time in my profile, but the time is correct and the date is not.
I presume that everyone with a Fourth of July date is somewhere west of the International Date Line and east of me, since it will still be July 3 in this location for the next five hours.

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Click Controls (in the bar near the top of each Lounge page).
Under Options, on the left hand side, click Board Settings.
The first setting is Your base time zone – select the correct one from the dropdown.
The second setting is Auto correct DST – tick this if you want to correct for daylight saving time automatically.
Click “Change My Account Options”.

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And it is still down, but a message as that the HOSTING site is down.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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And it is still down, but a message as that the HOSTING site is down.

The message should be removed soon…

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WindowsSecrets.com is back online; the temporary message should be gone now.

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Is there aproblem with the site or do I need to check for gremlins ?

Just received this from Brian Livingston:

“Hi. I wanted to let you know that WindowsSecrets.com was
unavailable on July 3 and the early part of July 4. A
serious electrical fire shut down the Web hosting company
in Seattle that we and hundreds of other sites rely on.

Windows Secrets came back online at approximately 9:15 a.m.
Pacific Time July 4. Before then, if you tried to look up
an article or click a link in an old e-mail newsletter, it
would have failed. I apologize for the inconvenience.
Please try it again, and everything should work now.

My staff and I can assure you that no information was lost
and your subscription to the Windows Secrets Newsletter
should continue exactly as before. However, we’d like you
to check your preferences page and make sure all your
fields have correct data. Please use the following link:

http://WindowsSecrets.com/prefs/.

It is ESPECIALLY important that you enter an alternate
e-mail address. This is your own personal “disaster
recovery” plan. Companies change their filtering policies
every day, and sometimes readers stop getting the
newsletters they’ve subscribed to or paid for. When we
receive a bounce notification, we send a short alert to
your alternate address. This is the ONLY use we make of
this information, and many people have thanked us for
informing them of a problem affecting their inbound mail.

Our own disaster-recovery plan consisted simply of
switching to a maintenance server, which displayed a
message about the hosting company’s fire. As a small
gaggle of writers, we found the cost of buying and
synchronizing two servers in separate data centers too
great. Instead, we chose to locate our equipment at a
“hardened” data center, with dual diesel generators that
could power the hardware indefinitely in case of any power
outage.

When the blaze started, however, fire marshals ordered the
evaculation of the entire building, and the generators
could not be run. This knocked out some very big Web
sites, not just our own. Authorize.net, one of the world’s
largest credit-card gateways, couldn’t process transactions
online for its 238,000 clients for about 12 hours. Bing
Travel (a component of Microsoft’s new Bing search engine)
was dark for even longer.

I’ll tell you more about the fire and our recovery efforts
in next Thursday’s regular newsletter. The good news is we
began a transition back in January 2009, when we spun up a
server “in the cloud” to test the benefits. We plan to
move WindowsSecrets.com to cloud computing within one year.
When that happens, we’ll have hot-failover capability
across data centers, which should keep our site up even if
one center completely loses power or connectivity.

As far as we can tell, all of our services are back to
normal. Please take a minute to visit WindowsSecrets.com
and do a search, check our polls, or read a review.

There’s no need for you to reply to this e-mail. But if
you find any corner of our site that isn’t working
normally, please use the contact page to let me know.

Thanks!”

Brian Livingston
Editorial Director, WindowsSecrets.com
http://WindowsSecrets.com/contact/

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Here is a link to the Seattle Times story http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/loca…herplaza04.html

This affected one of the local radio and TV stations.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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