I have moved the boat from the summer mooring to the winter mooring (well within a couple of slips; the summer occupant of the winter mooring is having engine trouble, and was still there when I arrived). The address on my website has been updated to reflect this change.

Once again, I have moved back to the island (yesterday morning). My website has been updated to reflect my change of address.

Just brought the boat back to the island. My basic information page has been updated to reflect this change in address.

Due to a disk failure in an already degraded RAID array, the main melon.org server: ambrosia.melon.org went down at roughly 1914 EST (-0500) last night, and all the contents of /home were lost.

The server was brought back into operation at 0103 this morning, and the following websites, largely unaffected by the data loss, were running again: www.anarreshealth.ca, rolling.melon.org, kiwano.melon.org, winter.melon.org, and fleshy.melon.org (except that the images linked to from rolling.melon.org are actually on unripe.melon.org).
Mail service also resumed, and no mail was lost.
By 0230, unripe.melon.org was restored from backup (with the exception of the images which are still being restored from backup as this is being written).
The sudden interruption in service caused a (very) slight, but not automatically repairable error in the database server, which was repaired by 0304.
The gallery2 site, shiny.melon.org was storing all its images in /home, and they remain to be re-uploaded from their original sources (in at least one case, this is a blessing in disguise).

User directories (and outside sites) have typically been the user’s responsibility to back up. My own user directory is being restored from backup right now (and includes the images still missing from rolling.melon.org). Additionally, for the bulk of mp3s, videos, etc. in the affected filesystem, The Pirate Bay is being used as a backup, since it requires much less effort than heading out of town to get my CDs/DVDs out of storage, and re-ripping them.

In other news, bringing the server down to install a replacement disk also provided an opportunity to switch to a vserver-enabled kernel. I’ve got a few spare IP addresses, and I’m doing some contract work that involves vservers, so if you’ve got an excuse for me to hone my vserver skills a little, I’d love to hear about it.

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.