October 4, 2003

Radio UserLand woes

Christian Crumlish

The Salon blog community servers (hosted by UserLand) have been down since sometime Friday, which is frustrating for the Salon bloggers who rely on the community server to host their blogs (and their comments) and to track updates and traffic figures. As far as we can tell, UserLand is down to two (no-doubt overworked) employees, and attempts to reach Lawrence Lee have thus far failed.

Scott Rosenberg, our local blogfather, is at BloggerCon, as is Radio's emeritus CEO, but neither of them are really in a position to help. Meanwhile the Salon blogger mailing list gives people space to vent their frustrations.

I don't rely on UserLand to host this blog, although this is a Salon blog with a local usernum (I do use the Radio community server for notification of updates and for tracking traffic), so this site is at least still reachable, unlike sites whose domain name start with blogs.salon.com, however I am having problems with the one part of network of sites that still relies directly on Radio for its engine, the Mediajunkie site.

For some reason, Radio has been unable to upstream any updates since last Monday, September 29. My page for tracking events shows a series up apparently successful upstreams, but clearly nothing's been updated on the publicly visible site. I do get a TCP/IP error when I start Radio and it tries to check for updates to Radio.root, but this could be an effect of the current UserLand server problems and possibly unrelated to my upstreaming problem.

I'm not sure how to even diagnose this problem. The usual mantra of quit and restart, shut down and reboot and try again, isn't working this time. This may force me to go to a different backend for Mediajunkie's aggregrated post listings, possibly a table full of MTrssfeed-driven headlines? It wouldn't be as dynamic and interlaced, but it would approximate what I'm trying for now and free me from relying on what can only be charitably described as flaky software.

UPDATE: Typically, as when you call a TV repairman only to find your television set behaving perfectly when scrutinized, it appears that my posting a public complain about the Radio software has coincided with it starting to work again properly. It appears to be upstreaming entries from October 1 this moment and should be caught up to the present day soon. Still no idea why it works when it does and doesn't when it doesn't.

Posted by xian at October 4, 2003 1:00 PM
Comments

Seems they may be back up, or at least intermittent. http://blogs.salon.com/0000014/

Posted by: Al at October 4, 2003 1:11 PM

Looks like our posts crossed :)

Posted by: Al at October 4, 2003 1:12 PM

But now the Radio discussion group on the Userland Web site is down.

Posted by: Scott Mace at October 6, 2003 10:42 AM
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