And..we’re back.
Folks, we’ve had a few issues today relating to the change from our old CDN to the new one. A CDN makes the site faster by storing lots of the content you download (pictures, code, formatting, etc) in multiple places across the world. This means that you get a fast copy of non-changing stuff served from this more-local source along with new content from the server such as comments or new or edited posts.
So, sorry for the issues – things should settle down. I wasn’t touching anything today, this was more of a side-effect from some settings I should have changed before it became an issue. Their system allowed some slop and so I was sloppy. My apologies!
Open, non-site-related Thread!
ETA: The site will be a bit sluggish the next 12-24 hours until I rebuild the CDN setup and get it working again. I wanted to let the dust settle before I take another step!
rikyrah
Glad to see BJ back.
Thanks for all the work you do for this place ??
Sloane Ranger
Thanks Alain, I was getting withdrawal symptoms!
BeautifulPlumage
Thanks Alain! Would prefer to have Cole’s twitter in the sidebar, but @TwitterDev is….interesting.
Alain the site fixer
@BeautifulPlumage: WTF? I didn’t do nothin’
Alain the site fixer
@Sloane Ranger: Me too! Lucky I peeked in and saw an issue, I was on this long before anyone reported it to me.
I’m taking a little break, then I’ll be back to redo the widgets which includes John’s feed. FYI nothing that happened today should affect that feed, this is just happenstance.
?BillinGlendaleCA
Still can’t get here through my router, getting a DNS error.
prostratedragon
What a relief. I thought I triggered it when clicking on the link about Randy Weston (R.I.P.) in the morning thread. A scraping of his charisma to help keep a good thought.
Chip Daniels
I blame the Deep State.
MisterForkbeard
@Chip Daniels: Also known as Major Major Major Major.
Corner Stone
BJ’ers! Do Not Be Fooled!! This is a soft administrative coup of BJ HQ by the usurpers!
Kdaug
Carry on, Alain. You’re doing fine.
Hilfy
Thank you, thank you! I couldn’t reach BJ no matter what I tried. My laptop needs a tune up, so I thought that was the hang up.
Alain, the last few weeks I’ve been getting a message “This website is using an inordinate amount of power” Then my laptop overheats. Is this due to your changes, or laptops need of an overhaul?
Alain the site fixer
@Hilfy: I’ve got to follow up on an email, thanks for the reminder.
Alain the site fixer
@Corner Stone: yeah we pointed dns to our hosts’ servers instead of former CDN setting that still worked until it didn’t.
cleek
getting some certificate errors. bad enough that FF won’t let me in
Yutsano
@Alain the site fixer: Bring on the bubble gum and baling wire!
But seriously thank you for all your work here Alain. We really do appreciate all you do for us worthless jackals.
feebog
Translation; hamsters getting tired, needed a morning nap. Up and running on the treadmill now.
J R in WV
So more comments on Fuck Scott Walker than here, what’s wrong with you Jackals?!?!!!!
I’m here to help fix that, not that I’m against Fuck Scott Walker, but that’s in Wisconsin and I’m not, har. Thanks Alain I missed the outage by switching to fiction for a break. Nancy Kress if anyone is interested, a great novel, second of a pair, strange SF, but rewarding plot ending.
Alain the site fixer
@cleek: they should have cleared out by now
Tarragon
Work filters the internet heavily. I was afraid they had caught on.
Alain the site fixer
@Alain the site fixer: Widgets fixed and slightly improved.
Ok, I’m done with this for today but I’ll be working on a few things tomorrow, off and on. I’ve been subsumed into estate duties and lots of other work the past couple of weeks as we get ever-closer to the anniversary. Good news – we’re getting closer to having On the Road back with improvements. More soon.
cleek
yep.
groovy.
trollhattan
Good, now I can stop being productive.
susanna
Back where??
Not here.
Baud
I thought you all had been raptured.
FelonyGovt
Thank you, Alain. Glad it’s back.
cain
So I got a problem. From Denver, I can’t access balloon-juice.com at all. It simply says it can’t connect. However, when I use a VPN and connect from London, UK the site works perfectly fine. What’s going on?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: My router was. I”m still getting DNS errors.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Whoa. Helen told me it was back up, but I still couldn’t get here. Cleared my cache and everything. I miss this place.
sgrAstar
Thanks, Alain!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@cain: My guess is that the changes haven’t trickled down through DNS.
I’m using my phone to comment.
Aleta
Thanks Alain. Great explaining as always. Thanks for all the good fast work and care.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I got it working by changing the secondary DNS to an OpenDNS addy. I guess the change in IP addy hadn’t been updated in either Google’s or Spectrum’s DNS servers. I still got an ‘Invalid Certificate Error’ in Chrome. No problem with MS Edge, Win10 PC for both.
Barbara
I read this morning that there is now a mandatory evacuation order in place for Dare County and Hatteras Island North Carolina.
Aleta
@Baud: ?? sound of one person laughing
?BillinGlendaleCA
…and now it doesn’t work through the router again.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Obviously the willow was planted too close to the blog.
Kenneth Kohl
@?BillinGlendaleCA: well played, good man, well played
JPL
This is the first time, that I was allowed on. I’m jealous of the others who were here earlier.
JPL
The police officer is saying that Botham Jean didn’t follow her commands, before she shot him. The apartment was almost dark. She breaks in, and if it’s almost dark how does he know she’s a police officer?
germy
@JPL:
He doesn’t. All he knows is someone has entered his apt and is yelling at him to put his hands up. Last thing he is expecting. Before he can even process what is going on, she fires.
There was a red mat on the floor in front of the door. Why she didn’t notice this, I’ll never understand. All the cop TV shows make them look like master detectives.
MisterForkbeard
@JPL: Now, THAT actually makes sense though. Not that I believe her, but that allows her to make it a ‘senseless tragedy where the police officer killed somebody that didn’t deserve but was legally in the clear” situation. It’s not a horrible defense for her.
From her perspective: She goes home, sees a scary black dude in her house. She draws, starts giving him orders. He refuses, she’s threatened, she shoots him.
From his perspective: Crazy lady breaks into your house in the dark, (possibly) waves a gun and you and starts yelling. You don’t obey the assaulter’s orders.
Again, don’t believe her at all but that’s an actual defense rather than the nonsense we had before.
TenguPhule
John Bolton threatens war crimes court with sanctions in virulent attack
Irony is not only dead, Bolton is violating the corpse in broad daylight.
TenguPhule
Fuck Tesla and Musk can screw himself.
MisterForkbeard
@TenguPhule: “If you even investigate us in a non-binding way we’ll attack you, criminally prosecute you and impose sanctions” is… about as awful and corrupt as I’d expect from the Trump admin. He *knows* we aren’t participants in the ICC, right?
opiejeanne
Oh God, I am such a stupid nana-head.
I lost my DL someplace, fell out of my pocket or something and just went online to renew it, and got sucked into a fake DL replacement site. Third party, extra charge for the DL if you ever get it. They wanted to keep the $3.99 “service fee” and I asked for the supervisor. Repeatedly. The guy talked over me, louder and louder until I told him I’d report the site to the WA AG if he didn’t let me speak to his supervisor. Kept saying it’s not that much money, it’s only $3.99. Fuck that, it’s a 20% fee on the cost of the DL replacement.
He finally said he refunded it all to me. Service charge my ass. The charge was still pending, it hadn’t been processed yet, and it’s a program that does the work. I told him I’d be checking and I’d come after them if he lied to me. I will, with the backing of my CU. They don’t take stuff off of no jerk with a script in a boiler room.
And now I’m still so pissed off I’m going to be useless for a while.
TenguPhule
@MisterForkbeard:
It’s Donald Trump.
TenguPhule
@TenguPhule: And Bolton.
JPL
@MisterForkbeard: How did she get in?
MisterForkbeard
@TenguPhule: Yeah, I know. Low expectations and all.
It’s just SO DUMB. The ICC *can’t* punish Trump except in minor PR ways – or, I suppose making foreign travel difficult. His base would probably love it if they ever did indict him. But he immediately goes whole-hog crazy and starts threats. Partially because that’s just what he does, but also because he can’t abide the idea that other countries aren’t respecting him.
TenguPhule
It’s all fake’: in Trump’s heartland, talk of White House chaos rings hollow
Aleta
@germy:
or the number on the door
the floor numbers ….
the number on the parking level if there was one, or the elevator …
Ohio Mom
I couldn’t see anything until about 5:00. I could see on Cole’s twitter that posts were posting but my phone kept coming up blank whenever I tried to get here.
It was a long afternoon for several other reasons too, but I guess all’s well that ends well.
Many thanks Alain, and Godspeed with the rest of the site maintenance.
MisterForkbeard
@JPL: Oh, don’t get me wrong: There are a number of holes in her story and I don’t think anyone should believe her. But this is way better than before, where “I got into the wrong apartment and thought the occupant was robbing me so I shot him”. It at least notionally makes sense and doesn’t make her negligent outside of the initial mistake of going to the wrong apartment, which lots of people have done.
<– This is what I expect her lawyer to say, basically. It's a better story that she had before by a mile and leaves her *less* culpable.
TenguPhule
Via the FTFNYT,
The Republicans are trying to kill us all in order to make a few extra bucks.
?BillinGlendaleCA
Now I can seem to access the site in Chrome, so I can go to Costco to get popcorn since it’s the start of another Infrastructure Week*.
*It’ll be the best ever!
trollhattan
@JPL:
“Get out of my apartment, NOW!”
“Uh, it’s not you[BLAM!].
Guessing it went a little something like that. We will never know, unless Alexa was listening.
trollhattan
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
We tried to warn them yesterday, but noooooo.
I’ll recycle the “somebody call Router Rooter” quip anyway.
TomatoQueen
Not just me and IE 11 and the gov’t vpn then. A full day of productivity is exhausting, worried about tomorrow.
Doug R
I was getting a DNS error first thing this am, checked one of those “is it down?” sites and BJ was down. Still happening this afternoon, so I screwed with the DNS settings on my router. Now I can’t get ANYTHING. At least Shaw cable has a call back service when they’re busy and internet is still working on my ph
suezboo
Well, way over here in SAfrica, the site has been just fine all day long. Thank you so much,Alain and M4 for your work and dedication to us jackals.
WaterGirl
Alain, one of my BJ friends still can’t get on. Do you happen to know if all the CDN nodes been hard refreshed?
Fair Economist
Yay! I was thinking “what was posted to get the Russian concerned enough to activate the DNS hackers?” And it’s just a site update glitch? Bor-ring!
The Dangerman
@JPL:
We’d have video but apparently policy is cameras get checked at the door after the shift is done; why they don’t do the same with guns is a bit of a mystery (I mean, if you’d packing, you should be packing a camera, too, and vice versa).
I can easily see mistaking apartments but she was probably well lubed up (not saying that’s wrong, but, again, if you are packing, maybe getting lubed is a bad idea) and we know the rest…
WaterGirl
Alain – Error Message for person who still can’t get to BJ:
Miss Bianca
Hang in there, Alain! Glad we’re back, and hope you’re well!
Anotherlurker
@Sloane Ranger: I, too, was jonesin’ for my fix of Jackel sanity. Just got it back at 8:30 PM.
Steeplejack (phone)
I was just able to get back on Balloon Juice on my phone by turning off wi-fi and going 4G (Verizon). I rebooted my phone, my computer, my router and my cable modem, and I can’t get access to BJ on any device via wi-fi. Could the CDN problem have screwed up DNS addresses or lookups somehow?
suzanna
Thanks, Alain. Well done and appreciate your doing what you do, and do so well.
oklahomo
Alain, thank you for this change, no matter the pains…If I am working from home, anything to help sites load faster is a blessing. My only options for internet are piss-poor cell coverage, satellite internet, or dial-up over copper where the best is 12.2 and usually it is 9600, which is never going to be a real option.
opiejeanne
@The Dangerman: When we lived next door to a cop they were required to be armed off duty whenever they were in public
WaterGirl
The RSS feed for Balloon Juice is no longer working. RSS feeds for all my other sites are working just fine, so this appears to be specific to Balloon Juice.
WesinCLE
I pity you if working with Akamai. They are great CDN but so difficult to work with.