Over the last week or so, you may have occasionally seen, instead of the Homeland Stupidity website you’ve come to know and love, a short message stating, “System maintenance is in progress. Please try your request again in a few minutes.” For those of you who are interested, I’m going to explain why that message appeared and what I’ve done to correct it, so that access to the site remains up and running for everyone.

First, what the message is: The message is displayed automatically by the web site software whenever there’s a problem communicating with the MySQL database server which drives the site’s backend. I’ve been tuning MySQL to eliminate the problem, but I ran into another problem… But I should back up and begin at the beginning.

Prior to last week, my site was hosted at Site5 shared hosting. Aside from the occasional hardware problem, Site5 has provided excellent service and been very quick to respond to any issues I’ve had. I’ve been a happy Site5 customer up until recently.

What’s happened is that Homeland Stupidity has simply outgrown the ability of a shared hosting account to support it. Therefore, the weekend before last, I moved it to a new virtual private server provided by Unixshell#. With virtual private servers, you receive a virtually complete set of hardware, but you are expected to provide your own system administration.

Therefore, MySQL, with its default settings, was going haywire trying to handle all of Homeland Stupidity’s traffic. This happened on rare occasions with Site5, but it was happening every couple of hours on Unixshell#. I then learned a few things about tuning MySQL to run in smaller environments, and using the my-medium.cnf as a sample to go by, got MySQL retuned to work in the new environment. I also had to tune Apache just a little bit. So the problem mostly went away.

Then I discovered that MySQL was crashing and corrupting some of its tables. Version 4.1.12, which is what shipped with the CentOS 4.2 Linux operating system I use on the server, has bugs which cause this, and weren’t fixed until version 4.1.18. So I got that installed, and finally, the site is stable again, and handling its traffic without complaint or incident.

Then I had to get my e-mail moved. Fortunately, this was easy compared to moving the web sites. I simply installed the excellent Citadel package, which does e-mail and a lot more. It took all of five minutes to configure Citadel, and most of that was simply telling it what domains to answer e-mail for, and setting up my personal e-mail addresses again. I also had to set up a local Postfix server to gate in mail generated by the server itself, because of Citadel’s strict anti-relaying policies, which also ensure that no spam will originate from here. But that’s another issue. (Disclaimer: I an on occasion one of the developers of Citadel.)

Thanks to all of you for bearing with me during this move. While having to run the server as well as the web site is a bit more responsibility, it also provides me a lot more flexibility, and with that, Homeland Stupidity will be rolling out new services in the near future which wouldn’t have been possible with shared hosting, and wouldn’t have been possible without your continued support.