Rocknerd: not dead yet!

[reddragdiva]

In fact, it's showing distinct stirrings. New server, courtesy blarglefiend. Still tweaking and tuning.

You can now log in. (If you're a regular reader and especially a regular poster, you really do want to bother.) You can still post anonymously (as 'Industry Shill'). If you've used Slashdot, you'll be familiar with the system.

If your work proxy/firewall is too paranoid, you may not be able to access the site - http://rocknerd.org/ automatically redirects to http://rocknerd.org:8002/, and sometimes the firewall is in front of the proxy and not letting odd ports through. This seems to be what's happening for me and others. Fortunately, there are ways around this; this one or this one work for me. (Please comment if you're having such problems.)

The old site content is not up yet. We haven't worked out how to port from the old Squish database without application of brute force and ignorance. (And there's ahahaha the Senojweb bill to pay. Which will be paid, karma being a good thing to preserve.) There's a 'We're Back' thread for helpful suggestions.

Rocknerd previously ran Squishdot, which was pish-easy to set up and run, but suffered an unfortunate case of being a hideously unstable piece of shit that crashed like an obsessive test dummy; on several occasions managing to eat its own database in the process and needing to be restored from backups. We considered a few engines - I would have liked Scoop, but it doesn't yet have a stable branch - and eventually went with Slash. Which is a bugger to tweak or customise, but is industrial-strength and stable enough for Slashdot, so should suffice for our small needs.

Last night at Liquid Lab was fun, even if I was a goddamn zombie. mircea sums the evening up nicely, and duranorak has the roll call. Tonight I stay home and sleep.

Comments

[naughtypixie.livejournal.com]

bollocks! what the hell is rocknerd doing on port 8002? How am I supposed to convince my paranoid firewall admin to open that up (being that i've already used up my stock of excuses on the several other timewasting sites that are on non standard ports)?

[naughtypixie.livejournal.com]

And to follow up my rant... Ultra paranoid firewall admins block common proxy referrer sites... for which i've yet to have a good reason. :(

[reddragdiva]

Evidently you need to open a hole in your firewall admin.

There are ways around this, but they're grossly inelegant.

Wacky ports -- an explanation

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

We (the hosting group -- it's a sort of BOFH co-op) have four IP addresses to play with. They're all in use. So what we do is run weird things that need their own web server on wacky ports, then stick in redirects from something on 80.

This, as you've noticed, doesn't seem to play nice with some corporate firewalls.

There's a workaround, which is that we have the server on 80 act as a proxy rather than merely issue redirects. This is somewhat inelegant (not to mention downright crap) as it means two HTTP servers get involved on every single HTTP request.

If it turns out that a really significant number of people are having problems with the current setup, we'll look at moving to the proxy arrangement. Or, I guess, we could try waving cash at the provider (Panix, for anyone who cares) to get an extra IP. Hm. Might look in to that...

[damien-wise.livejournal.com]

Hurrah! Rocknerd.org is baaaack! :)
(Uh was goin' all twitchy from withdraal symptoms)