Something appears to be going wrong with melon.org’s MTA, and this appears to have been the case since June 30. Efforts are being made to fix it.

Since the upstream provider for ambrosia.melon.org had an outage today, the server was moved into the hosting facility during the existing downtime. It is now back up, and DNS updates should all be fully propagated by midnight tonight (EDT, i.e. UTC-0400).

The rackmountable case for ambrosia.melon.org having arrived, there will be some downtime, probably tomorrow or Friday evening, as the guts of the machine are moved into their new body.

There will also be some donwtime in the next couple of weeks as this body is moved to a proper hosting facility.

The basic personal information and biographical information pages on my website have been updated to reflect the successful defense of my thesis, completion of my doctoral program, and subsequent change in occupation to postdoc.

I just got the announcement of my departmental thesis defense, which will be on Fri. Jun 22, at 3pm (this date had been mentioned to me a couple of days ago, but the announcement was held off to make sure that one of my committee members hadn’t gone and bungled his schedule; this announcement serves to confirm that such bungling did not happen).

Of course, reading the announcement, I noticed a typo in my abstract; I’m sure I’ll have to fix that before handing the beast in.

Also, in the mail today, was the offer letter for the postdoc I’ll be taking in Sept.

I have moved Candy Cane back to her Summer mooring. My website has been updated to reflect this.

The portion of the city in which the melon.org server operates has been experiencing a severe brownout (there’s enough electricity to run the furnace fan, and a few compact fluorescent light bulbs, but no more) since the ice storm on Thursday night/Friday. Consequently, the server is down for want of electricity. The electric company is not providing estimates as to when power will be restored. Efforts to find an alternative location for the server, until power is restored, have been unsuccessful so far.

websited and email hosted at melon.org is working again.

Although only the disks were acting particularly funny, the hardware failure appears to be a partial failure of the north bridge. Repairs are not expected to finish before tomorrow afternoon.

Due to failing storage hardware (probably a dying disk controller) the melon.org server has been brought down to minimize data loss. Repairs are planned for this evening. The server will also be physically moved during this outage, cancelling the downtime scheduled on Thursday for the move. Websites and email hosted on the server will be unavailable while repairs are in progress.

A upgrade path is being implemented to replace (or make redundant) aging components. Any overdue upgrades/replacements should be completed by September, allowing the server to run more reliably again.