FAO Bill Mills

[MarkM]

Bill, I know I haven't seen you on here for a while but what the hell happened on Warpig? It is down for 2 weeks solid and now it is back the forum is practically empty...? Ok I understand server shifts etc but no holding page was put up and no announcement is to be found anywhere on the site. We had this conversation I think it was the year before last in Orlando with you and your wife? I was told by both of you that Warpig had never been down, well this time for certain it has and it is a pretty poor show that no explaination is forthcoming...Even AO when it falls over has the page that says an error has occurred and and an email etc has been dispatched.

[Army]

AO also has numerous Admin people to discover problems, and a dedicated webmaster to do updating.

WARPIG only has Bill and his wife. Considering that they spend so much time on the road to bring us real time tourney information from around the country...the Mills ROCK

[SlartyBartFast]

Got to wonder though, why not join forces and consolidate resources?

A common backend could be developed for membership, forums, b/s/t.

[Gunga]

I go check out Warpig every few days...has come up every time for me. Hadn't noticed any outages at all.

[MarkM]

My post might well have come over as being harsh...I read Warpig for the tech articles etc ok some of it is concerned with senario play but I don't close my eyes to it, but unless the lack of access is pointed out they will never know something is wrong...traffic logs should be the first sign assuming they have those easily accessable. The hosts of AO are Deleware and the forum when down generates the Error page with email etc etc so even a two person team running the updating should surely have a similar page ready for insertion....and Gunga check the forums...pruned beyond belief.

[Gunga]

Gunga check the forums...pruned beyond belief.

I go to Warpig for the articles, not the forums. I check the Warpig forums once or twice a year, so any changes there would likely go unnoticed by me. :)

[SCpoloRicker]

I had no idea it was just Mr. Mills and his wife running Warpig.

That's pretty impressive, I've been reading warpig forever.

Haven't been in a while, so I haven't seen any downage/clear-out.

[mag88888]

markm:did you say deleware? i used to be from there. whats going on there? an AO meet? if so then ahhhhhhh why did i move???????????!

[MarkM]

The computer server for AO is in Deleware...or at least the company name starts with Deleware...so no AO meets asfaik...actually looking at the spelling is it Deleware or Delaware?

[teufelhunden]

Delaware.

[MarkM]

Thanks I wasn't sure as it was a company using the name as often they will mis-spell things to avoid confusions.

[billmi]

Hi Mark,

We haven't had a 2 week downtime, ever. Over the years we have had a handfull of times that we've been down overnight. I think the longest was almost a full day in the late 90s when a hurricane did a lot of damage near our data center. Even then WARPIG was still up, the problem was that the backup generators for the two backbones it was using to connect to the 'net were run on natural gas, and the natural gas supplies were shut off for fear of leaks after the hurricane.

I have found more and more, that DNS is less reliable with some ISPs than others (notable I get the most reports about problems from Verizon DSL and Cox cable customers.) It seems that at times those ISPs simply won't connect to a number of web sites, and sometimes we are one of them. I just got an e-mail today from someone who said was so frustrated, he took his computer in to a compter shop, to make sure it didn't have a virus that was blocking WARPIG. He plugged it into their network, and viola, it called the pig up finem and he could get to it fine with dialup. He's a Cox cable customer.

Server logs confirm that we haven't had the 2 week downtime that you're concerned about (or any noticable downtime recently, for that matter.) I'd suggest contacting tech support for your ISP. If they're only letting you access part of the Internet, you're not getting what you are paying for.

As for the loss of older message in the forums, that entirely sucked, however, occasionally problems with backups happen, and we have to make do and move on.

[Dryden]

If this is a recurring issue, first try adding the warpig.com ip address to your hosts file:

Edit either:
Windows NT (NT/XP/2000): C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc
Windows 9x (98/ME): C:\WINDOWS

and append to the bottom of the file named 'hosts':
66.98.198.57 [tab stop] www.warpig.com warpig.com

If that doesn't work, check the follow re: black hole routing:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;159211

EDIT: It appears that EV1 (Warpig's carrier) blocks ping requests, so if you follow the MTU adjustment advice in the preceeding MS-KB article you won't get responses to the ping command. The last point on the route to the EV1 server is 207.218.245.110, so try pinging that instead to find the MTU fragment size you can use, assuming of course that a black hole route is your problem.