I express my exasperation with bad questions » « A resonant quote

Wait, what? We’re live again?

Yuck, I had my head deep in the bowels of the beast. I finally got BlueHost to accept me as the Man in Charge, but it still wasn’t working, and they told me I had to work through Digital Ocean (yeesh, boy is that complicated) and get them to tell cloudflare to accept our domain address…and it was looking like a nightmare. And then I suddenly look up and it was working! For now!

This job is so easy. I have no idea what I’m doing.

I express my exasperation with bad questions » « A resonant quote

Comments

  6. WhiteHatLurker says

    You do have a backup person in charge in case you are in some place with wonderful weather and no network when this occurs again?

    After all, you’ll be retired and can decouple from Morris for periods of time.

    Oh, and welcome back. Selfishly, as I missed you the site.

  10. says

    I was thinking the same @9. Have you seen any evidence of sabotage? Most of your enemies are whiny hateful idiots, but a few of them are in the techbro “class”.

    Anyway, glad (and relieved) to have you back!

  11. Stevko says

    It turned out that putting IP addresses 188.114.97.10 and 188.114.96.10 for freethoughtblogs.com into hosts file worked during the whole time (those are cloudflare addresses). I will keep them somewhere in notes, in case this happens again.
    Also, this seems to be WordPress and news here (even regular ones) are posting stuff about some very bad bug in PHP which may be relevant for you.

  13. psanity says

    I’m still experiencing occasional glitches, but it’s good to see you back! and thanks for posting updates on BlueSky – it is greatly reassuring to know what the problem is.

  14. Owlmirror says

    Copy-pasting from 2024, with a few edits.
    .
    Hosts files are simple text files that contain the numerical addresses that the internet routing system uses, and a text string that corresponds to the server that you want.
      On Unix(-like) systems (eg: Linux and MacOS), this file is located at

    /etc/hosts

      On Windows(-like) systems, this file is usually * located at

    C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

    It even has brief header explaining what the file is and how entries should look.
    .
    Adding these entries will allow connections to freethoughtblogs to be made even if DNS cannot resolve the domain:

    104.21.234.50 freethoughtblogs.com
    104.21.234.51 freethoughtblogs.com

    The IP address has not changed in the past 2 years, so it’s probably stable, and safe to leave those lines in. If you cannot reach freethoughtblogs even with those lines in your hosts file, the IP address may have changed. If the IP address has changed, you should be able to either comment those lines out ( add the “#” character at the very beginning of the line), or delete them, and see if you can reach the site. If you still cannot reach the site, it may be truly down.
    =__________________________________________
    *: If you put the file somewhere else, you’re probably savvy enough to figure out where that is

  15. Owlmirror says

    (I feel a bit like I’m shouting into the wind — I posted that in 2024, and only a handful of people connected in during the DNS outages (and I suspect most or all were tech-savvy enough to have figured it out without my explainer))

  16. says

    I’m both sorry and glad PZ went to all that hassle to get back on the air.

    Thanks Steveko and Owlmirror. I navigated to and I added those IP addresses to the linux /etc/hosts file. It does work, slowly. NOTE: If you just put two those IP addresses in the browser url window as both http and https and bypass the tls ssl warnings you get a ‘403 forbidden’ cloudflare code.

    PZ said he had to work through Digital Ocean and get them to tell cloudflare to accept our domain address. Cloudflare is being used by many sites to try to prevent scraping by AI bots. But, it blocks many legitimate current alternate browsers like palemoon, etc. Additionally, the SSL/TLS cert is from G00gle Trust Services who may be logging your access. Having to work around all this whole unnecessary rats’ nest of middlemen and arrogant hosting companies all the time angers me.

  19. psanity says

    Owlmirror – NOT shouting into the wind. That is exactly what I needed to know! I thought I had saved it from last time, but couldn’t find it, and I am not techy enough to figure it out myself. Now carefully saved as “Emergency Pharyngula”. Thank you so much!

  20. davetheresurrector says

    Owlmirror – thanks! I added those two addresses to my Windows etc/hosts file. Had to use Notepad++ in Administrator mode.

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