p2pnet – back online
p2pnet.net News:- “I haven’t been able to reach p2pnet.net all morning,” emails Russell McOrmond from Ottawa, Ontario.
“Hope things aren’t too serious.”
Thanks for asking, Russell. As I write this (9:40 am on December 19, 2006) I’d been offline for about 12 hours in the wake of a huge and long-lasting storm system which hit parts of the North-West coast, with Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, my home, one of the most dramatically affected areas. It’s no Katrina. But some people won’t be able to tell the difference. For them, the devastation is total. Homes have been savagely destroyed, businesses ruined and lives left in limbo.
Yesterday, 250,000 people were without power. We relied on candles and our wood stoves for three days, but electricity was restored a couple of days back and apart from one or two very brief off/on power cuts, we thought we were over the worst of it. But “Vancouver Island braces for yet another storm,” says a National Post headline. So there’s more to come, if the weather guessers have it right.
The pic above, taken this fall, is the normal view from our kitchen window. The pic on upper the right was taken at the beginning of the snow-storm. The mountains disappeared completely and later, we couldn’t see the trees either.
So far, the freakish weather system has only claimed two lives, as far as I know. A husband and wife, using a gas-powered generator, were overcome by the fumes.
Meanwhile, although the connection is going up and down like a yo-yo, p2pnet is back online, giving me a good excuse to answer a couple of emails other than Russell’s which, when we went down before, asked why I’m, “under the impression that anyone gives a shit if I’m online or not,” as one of them put it.
p2pnet is a personal blog, not a business site. The ads keep me going, but only just. When I post, the image I have in mind isn’t of thousands of people: it’s of a few friends in different parts of the world. And they’re the people I’m virtually talking to.
So to them and other regular readers, or to people who’ve just dropped by, Hi again! Sorry for the down-time ……
Cheers! And thanks. And all the best …
Jon
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
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December 19th, 2006 at 6:17 pm
Hang in there Jon. I’ll be looking for you when you are able to come back. Life doesn’t end just because power goes down. You do your best and wait for better days.
This will be one of those times you will look back on another day in the future and say, “Yes, it was rough but we did alright.”
Good luck, god bless, and another time when things are better.
December 20th, 2006 at 2:27 am
I don’t get it. Is the actual p2pnet web site hosted in Jon’s basement? From what I can tell it’s hosted on a server in a data-center in New Jersey. Why the weather in BC would cause a problem for a web-server on the other side of the continent is unclear…..
December 20th, 2006 at 3:29 pm
It’s not hosted in my basement. I wish it was. But I write it there : )
Meanwhile, the bad weather meant electrical and ISP services were cut off, which in turn meant I couldn’t post anything.
And yesterday there were also unassociated DNS problems.
Cheers!
December 20th, 2006 at 4:04 pm
In my case it was the DNS problems. I had to restart my nameserver to clear the cache of bad data before I could reach the site. I’m glad I’m running my own LAN (my websites are hosted in my basement
and had the option to do that cache clearing.
And who is hosting the DNS?
ZoneEdit.com
8100 NE Parkway Drive
Suite 300
Vancouver, WA 98662
US
Maybe the Website is in New Jersey, but the DNS information is hosted in Vancouver, Washington, which is on the US side of the boarder but likely receiving some of the same weather problems.