Incident ID: 4111284 Reloaded

The other evening I was admiring my World Domination Map and I was just about ready to stretch out on the couch for a little Hinky snooze when BAM! The map went blank.

I pulled up an ssh session to BOT House and did a quick tcpdump to see what was going on, and sure enough that worthless, fucking "426 Connection closed; transfer aborted." error had elevated its grotesque pate.

I took a quick peek at the Proxy List page (which is also uploaded via ftp) and it was chopped in half.

Since the tech heads at GoDaddy had brushed me off with a "Call us if it happens again" the last time, I picked up the phone and punched their number up.

It took me a little longer than I would've liked to prove to the frontline support person that I wasn't nuts, but he put me on hold while he escalated the issue to the neckbeards in the backroom.

I must say I do like GoDaddy's "on hold" background music. It was Squirrel Nut Zippers' Put a Lid on It and a few other cuts from the "Hot" CD. Great stuff. Love that shit.

How did they know?

Anyway the guy finally came back and said the neckbeards observed the problem first hand and that they'd get back to me in "24 to 48 hours".

That was about 47 hours ago.

This whole incident has opened my eyes. Very occasionally there is some serious... dare I say it... lag on the UT servers. I've put a lot of time and effort into taming it. The biggest problem in the past was with users who play the old demo version of UT99. The number of maps they have is limited and when a map that everyone should have already had came up, that demo version would request the map from BOT House, not from the GoDaddy server (the same box that is chewing up my files).

In other words, Fat File + Skinny Pipe = LAG.

I solved that problem by putting all the standard maps (and a lot of other things) on the GoDaddy box about a year ago so that no one would ever need to pull files directly from BOT House. But now the lag comes back occasionally and we have this intermittent file-chewing problem. Unrelated? I'm starting to think not. I think perhaps the GoDaddy server chokes every now and then and the clients are falling back to BOT House for mods, maps, etc. thus clogging the skinny pipe we all play over.

Be that as it may, I am anxiously awaiting their response, which I still believe will be "Microsoft says it sucks to be you".

In other news, I've done a few minor upgrades to the Proxy Page. Found some really nice flag icons, added a "Date Found" column, and learned a thing or two more than I wanted to know about "non-breaking hyphens".

I have also added my Standard Disclaimer to the Hinky Links section on the right. It's hosted on GooglePages, which I have recently taken a liking to. If you've never used it, check it out. It's a great way for the HTML Impaired (such as myself) to hack together a decent looking Web page with very little fuss. Highly recommended.