The servers will be experiencing regular maintenance this morning.

Several servers are going through rolling restarts this morning to (hopefully) fix some lag issues.

Some servers are still offline. Reports claim until 12:30 PDT.

There is a built in module mod_status available in apache which helps to get server status from a web browser

To monitor Apache webserver,

• Open httpd.conf(Placed at  <Apache Install Dir>/conf/httpd.conf)

    vi httpd.conf

• Set the Location directive as below. It will alow only from 192.13.24.57

  <Location /server-status>

   SetHandler server-status

   Order Deny,Allow

   Deny from all

   Allow from 192.13.24.57

  </Location>

• Set ExtendendStatus  to on

  ExtendedStatus on

• Save the httpd.conf and restart the webserver

Now you can monitor your apache webserver with http://servername/server-status from 192.13.24.57 browser

Just turned on server-status or server-info?

I have previously not made much use of Apache’s server-status and server-info functions, but recently I’ve found a use for them as traffic and development increases on my new server.

After a bit of reading online, I noticed that The Apache Software Foundation doesn’t even protect their own server-status page. I asked for peoples’ opinions of this practise, since, at first glance, there is very little to be concerned about serving server-status information to the general public.

Thankfully, I took a second glance.

As my friend and highly skilled programmer Nebu Pookins soon pointed out:

What can you do with server-status besides regexp for “GET .*\?.*pass(word)?\=.*” (in which case you got bigger problems)?

I glibly replied that no programmer worth his salt would implement a password mechanism using an exposed method like a GET variable. However, there are many other parts of your site that server-status can expose which should probably remain private. For instance, if you have taken pains to hide your web-based administrative tools, you will expose them to the world.

How can you go about protecting server-status and, equally importantly, server-info?

The first thing to realize about these two “pages” is that they are internal functions to httpd, and can not be protected by any mechanism above the server layer (like a PHP script or a /server-status/.htaccess file).

The answer is extremely simple: embed the directives you would otherwise put inside an .htaccess file directly into the <Location /server-status> directive, like so:

<IfModule mod_status.c>
#
# Allow server status reports generated by mod_status,
# with the URL of http://servername/server-status
# Uncomment and change the ".example.com" to allow
# access from other hosts.
#
<Location /server-status>
    SetHandler server-status
    Order deny,allow

    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "Developer Zone
    AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/extra/mod_status.htpasswd
    Require user developer_joe
</Location>
</IfModule>

Exactly the same can be done for server-info.

I should point out that this method has all of the pitfalls of httpd’s Basic htaccess method and is not foolproof. This will, however, allow you at least to password protect some sensitive information, while still allowing you access to it from outside your LAN.

If your development machine always has a FQDN, you can also add that above in an “Allow from name.com” drective.

For additional security, you can change the name of the path to the server-status to some random string, which will make it difficult to find in the first place. Security through obscurity is among the weakest methods, but another layer never hurts.

I welcome your commetns and experience(s).

This used to be a helicopter. It crashed.

Was the crash worse than anybody realizes, or Blizzard is willing to admit?

It all began this afternoon.  The servers came back up on schedule and then, almost immediately, went back down.  They’ve been down ever since.

Wowrealmstatus.net appears to have collapsed already under the strain of people wanting to know if their realm is back up or not.  Lord knows the Blizzard realm status page is unreliable and lots of people use Wowrealmstatus to find out what’s going on.

Blizzard has announced on the service status forums that it was a problem with the in-game mail system that has caused this outage.  They originally predicted a return-to-service at 6pm, but have since edited the post to remove that prediction.  (It’s now past 8pm.)

I’m not really comforted by Blizzard’s choice of words either.  They said “We can now see most of the lost items in player mailboxes.”  That doesn’t really inspire me.

Is this going to be a major multi-day outage like the EQ2 outage several years ago?  If it is, this is poor timing on the eve of a major expansion launch.  What does it mean in relation to the launch?  Only time will tell us.

Q. I can’t get to my blog! Is WordPress.com’s server down?

A. Probably not. WordPress.com runs on hundreds of servers located in several separate data centers in different parts of the USA. We’re not perfect and we do occasionally experience problems, but our network is designed so that blogs continue working even when servers or parts of the network fail. Outages are rare and brief.

On the other hand, the Internet is made up of many thousands of networks all linked together. It’s quite possible that there’s a problem with one of those networks somewhere between you and WordPress.com, that is stopping you from reaching our servers. Here’s a quick way to check:

Is WordPress.com down for everyone or just me?

When there is a major outage or scheduled maintenance we post a topic about it at the top of the support forum.

Apparently I did overkill Categories on my other blog. I had 61 of them. While trying to reduce the number of them the entire page run into permanent loop. It has been several hours now. Apparently the server keeps converting all 61 categories into a default category. I just hope that it will fix by itself by tomorrow.

Here too there is a problem with converting categories structure. I wonder what is their server status. Switching to Opera didn’t help. IE didn’t do the trick either.

The only way was to delete category Polander.

Wow! There is a bunch of Polish language blogs in the English section of The WordPress.

• Panstwo — Blogs, Pictures, and more on WordPress
• ..

I had to switch to different template in order to stop the loop.