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I haven’t had much time to talk about it, but yes we here at Punk Labs have been busy. Due to some unforgivable downtime, yet happily received growth on RocketDock.com, we purchased a new server to take on the responsibilities of hosting RocketDock and hopefully all our other sites.
Not counting the new server we have two servers with RocketDock.com being on its own. Although RocketDock is pretty popular it is ridiculous that the server it is currently on cannot support it with out going down once a day. So we took funds thanks to all our very loyal fans who have donated and bought a new setup. I won’t go into too many details regarding the old server, but the new guy is:
Running CentOS Enterprise
CPU : Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (4 x 2.4GHZ 8MB Cache 1066)
RAM : 4GB ECC DDR2
Hard Drive : 250GB 7.2k RPM SATAII 16MB Cache
Control Panel : cPanel / WHM
Public Port Speed : 100 Mbs Public
Private Port Speed : 100 Mbs Private
Public Bandwidth : 2000GB Premium Transfer
RocketDock.com has already made the migration over to the new server and the DNS update should (if not already) be propagated. Once we get some good statistics on how the new server is running with just RocketDock.com we will start migrating over all our other sites if the server appears to be able to handle it (and with these specs it should).
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When I got up this morning I was greeted with a tweet from @aowe saying RocketDock was up on LifeHacker for best application launcher. The article goes over both Windows and Mac OS X application launchers, and we have some pretty good competition. It’s always cool to see RocketDock up somewhere.
You can check the article out at:
http://lifehacker.com/392569/best-application-launchers
Don’t forget to drop us a vote!
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Ah, PolyVector and I can finally kick back and relax. it looks like RocketDock.com is up and running smoothly. The DNS finally caught up and we also got the new RSS feeds (backed by FeedBurner) up and running.
With that out of the way we can continue work on our other projects that have been put on hold while we make sure our RocketDock users have a nice place to share their creations.
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For the last two weeks we have been working feverishly on getting RocketDock.com back up. Now to some it might seem like a no brainer, we got a new server and so place the existing site we have backed up on this new server for all to enjoy once again. Well, it isn’t that easy.
Our original server hosting RocketDock.com we were afraid was compromised due to a security hole in Joomla. And I don’t mean compromised where everyone’s passwords were stolen, but a hole were spam bots were able to enter and possibly send out spam under the guise that it was us. Thus creating the downtime we had originally regarding the blocked IP.
So RocketDock.com is now backup with a brand new site crafted by PolyVector himself. The only problem is the painstakingly slow transition via DNS. For some reason our Domain service points to themselves when you change the name servers over to something new. before we were simply using their provided name servers and pointing our sites via their server’s IP. But with the new dedicated hosting we have for RocketDock.com we have a new name server. This currently means that everyone looking for RocketDock.com specifically is getting directed over to a domain hosting service instead of Punk Labs or RocketDock.com. It is a shame, and quite annoying.
I have been wanting to make an announcement on Punk Labs, but because of the screwy DNS right now it would be worthless. For those of you that read our little blog, you are the first to know that indeed RocketDock.com is back up and should be functioning.
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For those of you keen on following news over on Punk Labs we have been dealing with RocketDock.com’s server downtime. I am so disapointed in our managed server company’s support on this one. We purchased the new server last month to take the full load of RocketDock.com. Upon switching everything over we noticed a huge onslaught of spam emails going to PolyVector’s personal email (which he also happens to use for business related stuff). We have searched high and low for the problem on our server. The odd thing is no one else who we host email for has had trouble with this spam occurrence (trust me, you would know what I am talking about if it happened to you). Then the unthinkable happens and our server company has told us the IP for that particular server running RocketDock.com has been blocked (who has blocked it, we don’t know, we are assuming the company’s ISP).
Now we are not server experts…I would call myself a complete novice, PolyVector knows the file system structure and how to work with settings files (and more I am sure). But when it comes down to this weird spam issue our hosting company has been….well…lets just say support is non-existant. Why on earth are we paying for a managed server when we aren’t getting help managing it. Our biggest fear was the new server came with a nice spam bot or botnet or some kind of fun virus sending out email. It isn’t unheard of and issues like this do occur. In fact our last dedicated server company had to take down quite a few servers before we moved to fix a virus that did much the same thing.
Anywho,besides all this going on our phone has decided to sop working. We have been having issues with Skype on and off for a little over a year now. I had recently given up and forwarded our Skype number to our iPhone so we can still get calls while we debate on switching everyone/thing over to using solely the iPhone number. but now the forwarding doesn’t even work and we have been getting calls from friends where we can’t hear anything (not even a crackle) on their side. I am still not certain if they can hear me. So if you call our normal number you will get frustrated voicemail message from me saying to call the iPhone.
