April 2018 Archives

So, we upgraded the OS on the server that hosts this blog. Then discovered that Movable Type, the blogging system we use, is ... problematic ... with secure HTTP. (There's a fix, but it imposes a performance penalty.)

This coincided with (a) the UK eastercon and (b) the copy edits for "The Labyrinth Index" (which are now done and it's on course for publication on October 30th), but explains why I've been silent for the past week-and-a-half. The silence is going to be ongoing for a while longer, too: I'm about to head off to Fiuggi in Italy for Deepcon 19, where I am guest of honour, and I won't have much time for blogging until I get home in the last week of the month.

Also, reality is leaving me in the dust when it comes to making up surreal news headlines: Hackers in Finland acquired data from a North American casino by using an Internet-connected fish tank. With news like that, what's an author to do? (Part 942, contd ...)

Hi there. Sorry for the hiatus on blogging; I'm just back from the Eastercon, and managed to forget to schedule an April Fool update while I was gone.

The bad news is, the hiatus is going to continue for a bit longer—and I'm switching off comments, too! The good news is, this is so that I can do a long-overdue operating system upgrade and blogging system upgrade, and add support for secure HTTP (so that google doesn't start flagging my wholly non-commercial blog as an insecure ecommerce site and downrank it in search). There may be other new features, too, when service is resumed: I particularly want to see if I can make the blog more tablet- and smartphone-friendly (while not compromising on the desktop experience).

There will be a couple of regressions, however: notably, the secure web server support will not include Internet Explorer 10 and previous releases (yep, Windows XP is officially end-of-life at this point). There may be other issues with support for older/obsolescent standards too, although I'll try to keep the system accessible to users with browsers less than a decade old.

Schedule: as of now, I'm switching off comments so that I can take a complete and consistent backup of the database and download it to my NAS, so that if everything goes pear-shaped I've got the wherewithal to rebuild everything. With close to a quarter of a million blog entries and comments, running on an ancient machine, this takes some time. (Yes, I run periodic backups. But new comments are coming in all the time, so they're incomplete.)

Once the backup is done, downloaded, and verified, my highly experienced sysadmin will do a long-overdue security audit and operating system upgrade, we'll create certificates for SSL and set up secure HTTP servers, mess with the DNS settings for antipope.org to support them, and switch things back on. Then I will do a long-overdue blogging software upgrade (skipping the technology forward about five years) and make sure everything works.

We should be back up by this time next week (hopefully a few days earlier).

See you on the other side!

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This page is an archive of entries from April 2018 listed from newest to oldest.

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