Wednesday, September 10, 2008

so much for dual-homing

Well, we're in the process of switching service providers and Mihai's power just went out, so our "dual homing, it can't fail!" strategy is not looking so solid now. The state file is lost behind's Mihai's power failure, so rather than roll back the hands of time yet again, I've brought up tahcytrap@gmail.com (you remember tahcytrap, don't you?). I've purposely given it no state or ppblog -- it's a temporary hold-over for the pchat addicts out there. When we're able to get PartyChat running back and proper, I'll take tahcytrap back down.

Update: everything back to normal now

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

and again

Well things got blanked and it turns out the automated backups were corrupted (they were incomplete files, thus bad XML. I don't know why), so I had to turn the clock back to 6/26.

I wish I could promise things were going to get more stable, but I don't have much time these days to do anything but tend to pchat's fires. c'est la vie i guess

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

i'm sorry

The woeful tail of how I lost the last 3 months of your PartyChat room data

I run a pretty spit 'n polish establishment here at Techwalla. And by that I mean, PartyChat runs on a "dedicated" P3 900Mhz machine in my living room, which emits a high pitched whine and occasional harddrive clack, much to the discomfort of anyone trying to sleep on the couch next to it. When PartyChat has issues, I log into the machine and restart things. There are many things that can go wrong with this, unfortunately there's been little incentive for me to improve the situation. We have some plans to make things much more stable (Real Soon Now™), but they're a ways off.

Anyways, I accidentally (whoops) deleted the file that stores all of the state for each PartyChat room (mainly: what rooms exist, who's in what room, what their alias is). The last back-up I have is from April 2nd (ouch). I've gone and substituted in that file, so you'll notice that your rooms have just hoped into a time-machine back 3 months (old aliases, old membership rosters). If you created a PartyChat room after April 2nd (and this is the part I'm really sorry about) you're going to have to re-make that room.

Clearly I should have been making more regular (off-site even!) backups of the state file and you bet your bottom that's what I'm going to start doing now. But that's cold comfort... and I'm sorry.

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

issues w/ the federation

We're occasionally seeing issues where messages between non-Google domains (e.g. partych.at) and Google domains (e.g. gmail.com) are not being delivered (this is the "xxxx did not get your message" errors you sometimes get).
I'm sorry to say there's nothing I can really do about this but I've e-mailed the Google Talk team about it and it should resolve itself fairly quickly (hopefully permanently).