The BlakJak.net server had an apparent hardware failure around 9pm on Friday evening...
A physical visit to the system and a cold start brought it back online, this was only able to happen shortly after 1am due to availability of a site PointOfContact.

On review all systems appear go, however, encourage anyone with content (web mainly) to ensure it is adequately backed up in the unlikely event of further problems occurr.

The uptime on the box was fairly reasonable so it might just have been 'one of those things' however the symtoms being displayed could imply a disk controller problem. Will be keeping an eye on the situation in any case, our hardware is not particularly old and it may be that a simple reboot keeps us operational for a good while yet!

As always, donations welcome =) This hobby system is, on the whole doing very well and despite recent interruptions is still available more than 99% of the time. :)

Just a quick note; there was an interruption to BlakJak.net services this evening for up to about 30 minutes, finishing shortly after 2230hrs. This was caused by a 'dicky switch' apparently. The switch concerned has been swapped out and we're back online, with thanks to our hosts for a relatively quick resolution....

Another note about RSS. If you subscribe to /node/feed you'll get the entire site's Feed, which includes the luverly Wyld's updates.

If you use /blog/1/feed you'll get my Blog.
/blog/2/feed will give you Wyldangels.

Hi folks,
Just a quick note, some of you will have noticed things went a bit pear shaped at around 14:20hrs today.
My provider advise this was due to an issue with their Network Switch. Indicators are that this caused an outage of approx 70 minutes duration, with services returning to normal around 15:30hrs.

[Edit: It also looks like DNS had a bit of a fit for a few hours this evening post the outage. All OK now though - you should'nt have noticed much as the secondary NS would've carried everything.]

Apologies for any inconvenience!

I've just managed to (finally) drag my Thunderbird mail archive from one PC to another - meaning I can start using it on my main system at home again. I've used it spasmodically before, but not for my primary email - thats still the case but I still monitor some secondary mail accounts with it.

That all said, though, having it in a working state again lets me play with RSS. I've never used RSS feeds before, but its become more and more popular and i'm starting to see why. Its an easy way to keep up with blogs and news sites.

BlakJak.net has an RSS feed of its own - subscribe to http://www.blakjak.net/node/feed to keep an eye on it.

I've added a block with 'Blog Links' to the right hand block set. Figured that I should actually put some decent pointers to other blogs in here - especially for those who give me the time of day.

If you have one I'm not aware of, let me know, and it'll likely get a link. I'm all for reciprocal arrangements, too...

Vik Olliver's Clippings included This Article, citing Firefox's position as now having 13% of the global browser marketshare (and nearly 40% in Germany!).

In response I had a quick look at the stats for www.blakjak.net over the month of June 2006:

Pos	|Hits	|%	| Browser:    		|
------------------------------------------------|
1       |10547  |24.85%	|MSIE 6.0          	|
2	|7023 	|16.55% |Mozilla/5.0 		|
3 	|5941 	|14.00% |Yahoo! Slurp 		|
4	|4333 	|10.21% |Googlebot/2.1 		|
5 	|1648 	|3.88% 	|Bloglines/3.0-rho 	|
6 	|1468 	|3.46% 	|msnbot/1.0 		|
7	|1384 	|3.26% 	|msnbot/0.9 		|
8	|1200 	|2.83% 	|Ask Jeeves/Teoma 	|
9 	|991 	|2.33% 	|MSIE 7.0 		|
10 	|971 	|2.29% 	|Akregator/1.2.2	|
11 	|892 	|2.10% 	|Bloglines/3.1 		|
12 	|636 	|1.50% 	|NewsGatorOnline/2.0 	|
13 	|614 	|1.45% 	|Opera 8.5 		|
14 	|543 	|1.28% 	|voyager/1.0 		|
15 	|505 	|1.19% 	|psycheclone 		|
-------------------------------------------------

Dissapointing firstly to see IE so well featured.
Also dissapointing to see exactly how much of my web traffic is pure crawlers. :( An insane number of hits per month just from search engines.

Off to Auckland in the morning for a coupla days.
So if i'm tardy in dealing with any issues that come up during that time, you know the why...

Just a short note to advise people that i'm over in Aussie again for work.
Back in NZ in the wee hours of Saturday Morning.

(In case anyones wondering why i'm being tardy dealing with emails, etc - thats why. Limited time/access to 'stuff' over here....)

BlakJak.net services were seriously disrupted by the power outages which affected most of Auckland today. An errant bios setting (!) prevented the system from coming back online when power was restored to the datacentre.

With thanks to our host, this has been corrected and services have been restored. Likely that email (etc) will need to catch up so patience reccomended.