phywriter.com|Prone to occasional grandiloquence

It appeared that SFWA President Michael Capobianco and the SFWA were finally heading in the right direction. After the SFWA v. Scribd debacle over Labor Day weekend, Capobianco disbanded the creaky, out-of-touch SFWA ePiracy Committee and brought in a who’s-who of smart, progressive sci-fi thinkers to recommend changes.

So much for change. Cory Doctorow was right, tonight Charlie Stross reveals the complete and utter failure to change things up, even if John Scalzi isn’t as convinced that things as bad as all that.

This recommendation was simple: that at all costs, Andrew Burt must be kept the hell away from the copyright committee. In view of his earlier activities, his appointment to it would automatically destroy any credibility the new body would have — not to mention sending out a clear signal that SFWA is a dysfunctional organization, institutionally incapable of learning from bad experiences.

Guess what’s happened?

Yup. I am not privy to his thinking, but our dear president and executive have voted to reinstate the old piracy committee, with Andrew Burt to chair it, under the new name of the SFWA copyright committee.

To say that this is a fuckwitted decision is an understatement. Under Dr Burt, the new copyright committee will almost inevitably devolve into a reincarnation of the old piracy committee. If I thought it’d do any good I’d be resigning in protest right now; only the expense of a life membership purchased a couple of years ago is restraining me right now. Clearly the current executive of SFWA is making damaging decisions and ignoring input from committees it appointed, and and in view of this I call on SFWA president Mike Capobianco and the rest of the SFWA executive — including Andrew Burt — to resign immediately. Meanwhile, I’d like to call on all other SFWA members who don’t want to see their organization commit public relations suicide to make their voices heard.

The DEP servers, including Ray Gun Revival, are back up!

Thanks for your patience.

Johne Cook / L. S. King / Paul Christian Glenn
Overlords – Ray Gun Revival magazine

http://www.navisite.com/sublevel.aspx?id=2017

We have now mitigated all outstanding issues that were holding up progress and are steadily bringing up more servers live. More than 60% of the servers are now on line, and we currently estimate that all servers will be live within the next 24 hours. We sincerely appreciate your patience and rest assured that we are working with the singular focus of brining your sites back up live.

Please visit this page frequently for information – we will update as new developments warrant.

Sincerely,
Mark Clayman
Senior Vice President of Hosting Services

Update:
This in from Bill Snodgrass, our liaison at DEP:

They are now saying 75% are up.

Looks like we are in the unlucky 25%…

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/05/navisite_outage/

Navisite scrambles to restore web hosting service
Planned server migration knocked thousands of sites offline
By Dan Goodin in San Francisco
Published Monday 5th November 2007 22:27 GMT

Navisite, the US webhosting firm, is scrambling to fix an extended outage that is believed to have rendered tens of thousands of websites inoperable for more than three days. The company hopes to completely resolve the problem by Tuesday morning at the latest.

The interruption started Saturday as part of a planned move to replace a fleet of aging servers operated by Alabanza, which Navisite recently acquired. Navisite warned customers their websites would be down for several hours during the migration, but unexpected issues have caused the process to take much longer than originally anticipated. Reg. “We are really hoping this is something we’ll be able to address by a very reasonable amount of time, if not by tonight, then by early tomorrow morning.”

Sinha promised to provide regularly updated status reports on progress here. A report issued at 11:35 California time said the company had “made good progress on the configuration of the core networking that has stabilized the environment and allowed us bring up a significant number of additional hosts.”

Update
More sites reporting on the massive server Navasite outage:

Computerworld

Light Reading

Info World

This in from Jeffeory Norris:

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Navisite-Outage-89170

There are two views of the outage.

First, putting the best corporate face on it:

A full complement of engineering resources have been committed to completing the overall migration and have been working around the clock to resolve overall service issues and to resolve specific problems. . . we regret the circumstances and apologize for significant inconvenience and remain positive that the long-term decision to migrate will ultimately be in our collective best interests.

However, some customers are fed up and taking matters into their own hands:

Cynthia Brumfield of IP Democracy is one of many thousands of customers impacted by the outage. She called the company to inform them that she’d be heading to the center to retrieve servers and data, but was hung up on. She’s heading to Andover armed with a video camera.

I have no idea what to tell you. My DEP contact is beside himself. People are losing their livelihood. You can still get the latest issue of RGR here. I may upload all the past issues here as well for an alternate download location.

Stay tuned.

Update:
The DEP servers are still down. Word from our vendor is that his server farm provider, a company named Navisite, is having “an internal DNS problem.”

We’ll post more as we hear it. Thanks for your patience.

Ray Gun Revival Issue #33

40 Pages

The Wastelander by Robert Mancebo
Fiction
A murderous alien raid shows a young pioneer that sometimes human beings can be too civilized.

Little White Truths: an Aston West Tale by T.M.Hunter
Fiction
Addictions can be hard to break, especially when they’re so much fun.

The Pasadena Rule by Ben Schumacher
Fiction
The Pasadena Rule says when you’re screwed, you do your job, and then you sign off. Unless, of course, you ignore the Rule.

Deuces Wild: “Strange Bedfellows, Part Four” by L. S. King
Serial Fiction
Tristan’s new alliance with Slap’s old enemy sets the former friends at odds.

The server that the Double-edged Publishing sites are on is currently down, including RGR. I called Bill Snodgrass yesterday afternoon and he’s working with the hosting company to rectify it and get everything back up.

I don’t have any prospective ETA on how long it will be down, nor any actual explanation what’s going on other than the most basic generalities.

Update:
Selena Thomason forwarded an e-mail from DEP publisher Bill Snodgrass:

I learned that on Friday overnight, our vendor was doing an upgrade due to be done Saturday morning. I am assuming something unexpected occurred.

I too, am unable reach any of the sites hosted on vendor’s server. I talked with him yesterday and he was working on getting it resolved.

I am copying him this message.

2nd Update:
I was assuming that this was a small upgrade gone bad at a local provider. Apparently, it was the polar opposite of that. Here are some snips:

(a) server farm got bought by a bigger company. All of the servers from the farm were to be moved to somewhere. They told (a guy) he’d be offline midnight to dawn Saturday. Now, 60 hours have passed.

(a guy) just spoke with, or should I say voiced my opinion very loudly about this poor move, to the engineers installing the servers. They are now saying between 5 and 7 this evening and all should be normal. They said they are moving and installing about 1000 servers. Mine are there and in line..I am waiting to hear back from their Sr Management.

I have been on a confernece call most of the day yesterday and almost all through the night. This move has been a total fisasco. There are 100′s of web hosts involved and somewhere between 175,000 to 185,000 web sites effected world wide. There have been between 35 and 60 techs working on this 24 hours a day since the move and I believe more to be added today. My servers are installed, cabled and running. The DNS has been an issue and they are hoping to have it fixed this morning though because of all the broken times they have advised un previously they will not commit to a time. I can now ping my server and my domain which I couldn’t do 2 hours ago.

I am small compared to most of the guys, some of which have 40 or 50 servers. One guy had 10,000 emails from his clients by 9pm last night. I do know that most likely we are going to end up filing a class action lawsuit on this. This company has absorbed 6 other companies successfully without any issues. From what I have heard they have alot to offer us if they ever get us up and running. I know they have a full force in there this am trying to get everyone up and running. They ended up having 5 tractor trailer loads of servers moved from Baltimore to Andover. None of which are currently online but all are now installed and cabled.

As you can see, the DEP sites were a very small part of a much larger mess. It sounds like there are a lot of people screaming very loud further up the food chain, and there’s nothing we can do but sit tight and reassure everyone we will be back. There is no ETA at this point. If you are inclined to pray for things like connectivity, well, it can’t hurt.

Lee is currently sedated, otherwise, she’d be vaporizing everything in sight. I can’t vouch for the space monkeys.

Final update?
Bill Snodgrass received the following word from our host. It’s looking potentially positive.

Bill,
Just wanted you to know that a number of the web hosts are coming back online. We are very close. Waiting on one more ip to resolve which they are telling me should resolve shortly..I have no idea what shortly means, but we are about down to the wire.

And, we’re back. Performance is a little dicey at this point, but I imagine that will improve. Thanks for your patience. Now, get in there and download RGR Issue 33!