I plan to migrate our servers to a different data centre tonight. There will be some disruption during the move, and it may take time for your DNS records to be updated.

We’re moving from the Fremont data centre, which has turned out to be about as reliable as a Ford Pinto, to the Dallas data centre (I look forward to your big-hats-and-oil jokes).

To perform some important maintenance on the site, it will be necessary to deactivate all Ozblogistan blogs temporarily on Sunday afternoon. I am expecting to take the site down around 2pm, central standard time, for up to two hours.

To that end, I have opened up a second server for Ozblogistan. Shortly, one server will handle the database while the original server handles the web side of things.

This will (theoretically) speed up performance and make it easier for me to grow Ozblogistan.

This decision is unrelated to the recent stoushing (though the stoushing may lead to other changes in future).

What this means:

1. All Ozblogistan sites will be offline tonight while I make the transfer. I will begin at 5pm Central Standard Time. The upgrade is complete.
2. I am looking for more tenants. I wish to continue hosting high-quality Australian blogs. While I don’t mind more blogs like the wonkish ones I have, I would also like to diversify as well. If you have a good blog you want to live alongside Club Troppo, Larvatus Prodeo, Catallaxy Files, Andrew Norton and Skepticlawyer, send me an email. If you have a favourite blog who you think should join the network, tell me (and them). The more the merrier, I’m building a big bus.

To keep discussion of this matter centralised, I have disabled comments everywhere except on the main Ozblogistan entry.

Thank you for your attention.

Updates

Taking the plunge:

• Peril Magazine
• Blogging Townsville
• Cafe Grendel
• Spray of the Day
• Iain Hall

LP’s domain name has expired. Consequently it is no longer possible to navigate directly to larvatusprodeo.net.

I have reactivated larvatusprodeo.ozblogistan.com.au in the meantime while the domain issues are sorted out.

Update: normal service has been resumed.

Last week I wrote briefly about slowness being caused by attempts to debug a comments plugin used by several Ozblogistan blogs — Brian’s Latest Comments — in the context of Larvatus Prodeo. It transpires that LP’s database of comments was too large to process without causing errors and slowdowns. During the week I worked on various modifications; these ‘work’ in that they have the correct behaviour and don’t crash, but in actual use they have proved to be unacceptably slow.

Consequently I have asked our blogs to deactivate the offending plugin for a few weeks. Our busiest, Catallaxy Files and Larvatus Prodeo, have done so, which should for now improve performance for everyone.

Why have I asked them to deactivate it for a few weeks? Because yours truly is moving to Darwin to take up a new job. I won’t have my usual computer for 3 weeks, according to the removalists. Once I am settled in I have another plan of attack to try, but until then I will not be in a position to easily fix things. Until then, enjoy the blogging.

The New Sever

First off, the site is now on a server shared with andrewnorton.info and skepticlawyer.com.au. It’s a “Mu” installation; the upshot of this is that user accounts are shared between these sites. If you’re logged in at one, you’re logged in at all three.

Secondly, there’s an improved backup plan in place. The upshot is that the database and files for all these sites are backed up every night. Should disaster strike ever again, it should be much easier to recover from. Club Troppo is backing up in the same fashion (though from a different server).

Thirdly, I’ve filled one common request and installed the WPTouch plugin. This means that those of you reading Catallaxy (or Andrew Norton, or Skepticlawyer) on mobile phones will get a different version of the site customised for small screens.

The Recovery Effort

As you all know, the archives of the site were basically lost or corrupted when the previous server was turned off. On and off I have been working on this problem for the last few weeks.

Although the database and the files are gone, I have been trying to reconstruct them from archives and caches. For instance, Catallaxy is archived annually in October by the National Library in the PANDORA archive. Also, Catallaxy is cached by search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

I have basically recovered as much material from these as possible (several thousand files worth). A lot of it isn’t directly usable, but it may be possible to recover hundreds of stories, including comments.

It’s slow going, however. Filtering, massaging, converting and importing the data is very fiddly due to inconsistencies, missing entries and so on. So don’t hold your breath — it will happen, but not right away.

In the meantime you can download the work and play with it yourself, as I have pushed my work-in-progress into a public repository on github.

Note for authors: You will need to generate a new password. To the best of my ability, your usernames and email addresses are identical to the ones you used to have.