What’s Up With FrontBurner: A Pseudo-Techie Explanation
Dear, kind, patient FrontBurnervians,
You may have noticed some strange things afoot on FrontBurner yesterday — things like posts disappearing, reappearing, and then disappearing again. You may have wondered a) Why would they do such a thing?, and b) Do they know magic? The answer to the second one is no (apart from a couple of card-tricks). The answer to the first is: It’s not our fault.
Okay, it’s *kind of* our fault. After weeks of planning and days of testing, we switched hosting servers over the weekend. I won’t go into the reasons why. But with the switch, we changed our DNS — you know, the thing that makes words like www.frontburner.dmagazine.com into numbers like 192.43.735830573053 (where the content actually is). We kept the old hosting server active as a precaution against losing data, but your ISP should know that it’s the old version and that there’s a newer one out there. If all had gone to plan, when you (and you and you and you) went to FrontBurner, the new DNS entry that we updated would have directed you to the data on the new hosting server. Worse case scenario, if your ISP had cached (remembered) the old hosting server’s numbers, that server should have told your browser “Nope, nothing to see here,” and your ISP would have looked around for two seconds and found the new hosting server’s numbers in the DNS listing, home of FrontBurner’s freshest content. But not all ISPs are cooperating (ie. they are not all looking for the new numbers), which is why you might see fresh FrontBurner at work but not at home. Or vice versa.
So that’s what happened and we know what’s going on, but we’re at the mercy of everyone’s individual ISPs to catch up. We’re removing the old version (all content will still be on FrontBurner, don’t worry), which should help speed up that process. And, as you probably could guess, the same situation has affected SideDish, DallasDirt, Overheard, and D Home’s blog.
Sorry, folks. (And a shout-out to Josh for working on — and helping me explain — the problem.)
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Yes! Congratulations on your blog re-independence D Mag. Big in Japan means nothing. Big in Texas is everything!
Without getting too technical, that’s not quite how DNS works. It’s a caching system; D’s hosting/dns provider controls the cache timeouts for dmagazine.com and everything underneath it. It’s not that other ISPs aren’t “cooperating,” it’s that their DNS cache is outdated because the view they have has not expired yet. But anywhoo…
I always suggest something to customers in this situation: just before the migration, go to the old server and put up a post telling everyone they’re seeing the old server (you may even still be able to do this, but it’s probably not necessary with late in the game). Providing a helpful way to work around the problem (like a temp URL or something) works well here too. There are a few things that could have been done with DNS (like lowering the Time to Live on the DNS records), but that window closed about a week ago, unfortunately.
Oh, and thank you. The RSS feed works with my reader again.
Or, in layman’s terms, if you are reading this then there is obviously NOT a problem. If you are not reading this, then you know there’s a problem, but you don’t know why. Oh, wait…if you are NOT reading this, then you are NOT reading this….never mind.
It’s so sexy when you speak geek.
When I saw this sentence, “It’s not our fault.”, I immediately feared D had been purchased by a cable TV company and I’d have to schedule a visit by a repairman.
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Got this a 1 AM Tuesday when I tried to express to Nancy what wonderful bird photo’s her Monkey Paw took on Monday. All the other comment pages were working…does your new server have something againest birdies?