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As many people have noticed, the nlab appears to have disappeared from the face of the earth. Going to http://ncatlab.org leads to a generic placeholder website.
Fear not, the nlab is still alive and well. It can be found at: http://nlab.mathforge.org. Similarly, the personal webs are at http://nlab.mathforge.org/web-name.
It may take a few days to get the ncatlab name back pointing to the nLab so in the meantime, please use the above. The problem isn’t anything malicious (or at least, there are far more likely explanations that aren’t malicious) and for once it’s not my fault!!!
I’ll fix the forum so that all links from here work properly. Unfortunately, I can’t put in a global redirection as that’s not under my control.
That is a relief, thanks! It might be worth posting this on the Café (if anyone with posting powers is reading this) for those who don’t use the Forum and might jump to the same conclusion as I did.
Would it be possible to change the links manually in Zoran’s post at the cafe? At the moment they just point to the ’spam’ page. This is a call to any cafe hosts.
It seems to be working again now?
It seems to be working again now?
Not for me!
-
According to Whois, Urs still owns the name. So I guess that Urs needs to make sure that those email addresses (and other contact info) still work and then contact the registrar (which seems to be eNom, but Urs probably bought it from an intermediary).
Hmm, that’s weird… it was working for me, but no longer. Maybe I was using an out-of-date DNS cache or something.
Hi everyone,
originally the nLab server and the domain name were rented by me via “A2” hosting company. When I canceled that subscription because their performance was quite bad, I thought that I had chosen to keep the domain name indefinitely. Apparently I must have misunderstood something. I never spent enough time acquainting myself with these IT issues, to be frank, so possibly the fault is all mine. (Though I could also try to blame it again on A2’s service, couldn’t I.)
To fix the problem, I have now taken steps to transfer the domain to UK2.net. Or rather, Andrew can tell you what exactly it is that I have taken steps to. I am now waiting for them to confirm my payment (supposed to happen during the course of this day). Once this is done my understanding is that I insert some name server name somewhere and the nLab will again respond at ncatlab.org.
Then, eventually, I will try to transfer all my ownershop of ncatlab.org over to Andrew, such as to ensure that it will be in more capable hands.
I am sorry for all this. I wish I knew what exactly I did wrong. But I am trying what i can to fix it.
My feelings exactly, Zoran. Well said.
Zoran, Finn,
thanks.
Everyone:
while Andrew is offline:
I received now the reply from UK2.net that my payment was accepted and that I should go to their website
http://www.uk2.net/
and “administer my domain”. They didn’t send me anything like a login information, though. I am not sure what on this page I should do to “administer my domain”.
But a minute later another email arrived, that asks me to agree with the transfer of the domain ncatlab.org. After going through some agreement procedure, I am being asked to provide the “Authorization code” of my domain.
After googling a bit to see how to do that, I find instructions to go to the webpage of
eNom, Inc. (R39-LROR)
and ask them to tell me my Autorization Code. Sure enough, on that webpage I am being asked to log into some account. That i don’t have.
So I am stuck right now. Waiting for Andrew. Or for anyone who might have an idea.
I managed now to get login information from UK2net. Still don’t see where to change nameservers, though. And still don’t have the Authentification code.
Zak McKracken was more fun. Otherwise similar.
After you log in to UK2, there aren’t any links saying something like “DNS configuration” or “Nameserver setup”?
I should have sent an update:
I managed to get the UK2.net password and log into the part of the page where one could in principle edit name servers. However, I can’t without first getting the “Authorization code” from the previous “reseller” of the ncatlab.org domain.
I finally figured out that i had to email “A2 hosting” and ask them to send this code to me. (I did check my email carefully, they did not send it to me before when establishing the domain.) So this is the latest now: I am waiting for their reply.
Then we’ll see. In principle I would then complete the transfer by providing that code and then be able to reset the name servers.
I still haven’t heard from A2. But will have to go to bed now.
Still no reaction from A2, though that is not all that surprising, given the time-zones. Let’s hope that something happens today.
I still haven’t heard anything from A2. Will try to contact them again.
But something has changed: at least on my system, when I go to
http://ncatlab.org/
The infamous screen-with-the-young-lady starts building up, but a fraction of a second later the window blanks and the address line displays
http://dp.000.in/
Then nothing else happens.
I do not get that happening. I did notice that Googling ncatlab gets some strange results! WHat browser are you using? (I googled http://dp.000.in/ and got some interesting(but incomprhensible to me) results.)
Still get the backpacker.
I just tried googling ncatlab.org and got a page that claimed to “review” it. No reviews, but we apparently have some “related websites” including a branch of the AA at Austin. Given that Austin is usually in the US, I’m guessing that this isn’t the Automobile Association.
I can’t tell if you don’t already know this, Andrew, but in the US, “AA” is usually taken to mean “Alcoholics Anonymous”. We do have AAA, or triple-A: the Automobile Association of America.
My results agree with Tim #20.
I have sent another email to A2, but still no reply. I will try to call them by phone later, first need to fetch my headset for that.
No reply yet. And I can’t phone them: my Skype account is emptied and the usual automatic payment is sending me error messages tonight. I need to try tomorrow from the institute.
This is becoming kafkaesque.
This is becoming kafkaesque.
No it is known as working with the IT industry! it sounds very like my trying to get one of our bank accounts unlocked after a slip up on passwords.
Just called them. After 15 minutes in the waiting loop, I spoke to somebody. He said he cannot give me an authorization code, as it does not look to him as if A2 currently owns the domain. I should look at the whois page who does.
It’s true, on the whois-page it says that the current “registrar” of ncatlab.org is a company called “eNom”. But on their website it said I would have to contact A2. I am again stuck, sorry.
I have now described the situation to UK2.net, asking them for advise on how to proceed with this. Now waiting for their reply…
Corporative capitalism at work.
So here is the latest: UK2.net said there is no way, I need to contact Enom. Enom now said, there is no way, I need to contact A2.
A2 differs from this in that they do not respond to email and in that their hotline staff after 15 minutes of intercontinental music transmission has no clue.
Very good business nowdays is to be a provider of half-products and half-services. The important thing for them is to have in small script in all contracts the disclaimers that any service has to be complete in any reasonable way, contrary to the feeling from the ads.
good news:
I am being told that ncatlab.org has been reactiviated by A2 and that it will work again within 24 hours from now.
Hooray! Thank you, Urs, for all your hard work in getting us back.
Stupid me: when all this happened, I had a bunch of pages in edit mode, both at nLab and my personal web. Many, many hours of work which I am afraid will be lost because I couldn’t get past the backpacker to save them. I would consider myself extremely lucky if all those pages were restored as they were in edit mode, but that’s probably hoping for too much.
Which browser were you using ? IE can not safely return to the pages which have invalid URL with all the form data untouched, while firefox usually has all OK. But it may depend on setting.
Hooray! Thank you!!
Great news. Thanks.
@Zoran: the most recent version of Firefox. We’ll see.
I mean when I am for example getting offline just after submitting a page to nlab, then I go back button and get back to the window in firefox having still my source code, without assistance of nlab or net. Can you open an additional window and experiment with mathforge nlab entry to see if you can make it behave this way? Now reopening the edit page from killed firefox sometimes has such behaviour on windows, the one on linux complains and does not do that from killed firefox.
it’s back: http://ncatlab.org/nlab/
Huzzah! Three cheers for Urs!
Three cheers for Urs!
One for messing things up in the first place. One for going about fixing things in an ineffective way. And finally one for fixing it afterall. ;-)
But the frustration never ends: while the domain is back, right now the server does not respond. And I can’t bring it back.
Hm, strange. I am working on two computers at the moment: my old webbook, my new webbook. On the old one I can’t reach any nLab page. On the new one I can reach some.
It’s working fine for me.
(Also, cheers for Urs!)
It’s working fine for me.
Interesting. Over here it’s painfully slow or does not work at all, depending on which computer I use.
I am already spending more than an hour on a tiny little edit I wanted to do…
Maybe Firefox is my problem. That browser is no longer what it used to be it seems. Just tried with chrome, and the nLab pages appear immediately. Just not with all math displayed…
Hurrah, it works from here. Though the response is unusually long. We expect sudden fall in temperature tonight (the coldest this Autumn so far, -11 in Zagreb) so it may freeze the connections :)
Once all works stably maybe we could make another anouncement at ncafe where also the alternative address and the links to last two digests (3000 and 4500) would also be made.
I’m using Firefox too, version 3.0.6.
I thought that maybe this was down to Instiki’s caching rendered pages, so that the first viewing of a newly-edited page could be much slower than subsequent views, but I’ve just edited monad (moving the ’related entries’ bit at the top of the page down to the bottom), and it only took a few seconds. So I’m puzzled too.
It is going fine now. (Maybe because my ears warmed up next to the radiator)
@ Urs #43
If they’re connected to the Internet differently, it may be that one is still using old DNS entries. That should fix itself within a day.
But this wouldn’t explain the speed, nor would it work if the two computers are connected the same way (to the same wireless network, say).
Was there any explanation for why the ncatlab.org name stopped working? Will it happen again? Are you still going to change the DNS provider?
I would like to use the name ncatlab.org. (In particular, I’d like the links from the Forum to go back to that name.) But I would also like it to work!
In wet and warmer North Wales, using Firefox 3.6.12 on an oldish MacBook, it works BUT redirects me to mathforge!!! or not depending on whether or not I force it to go to http://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/ etc. Then it uses a different serifed typeface and otherwise looks okay. The edit works ok as well.
Now that we have the domain name back, I’ll restore the forum links from the alternative name to the canonical one. The name ncatlab.org is certainly our real domain name. The nlab.mathforge.org is just an alternative route. It will stay available - it always has been an alternative route - but certainly ncatlab.org is the preferred name.
The bare domain name, either http://ncatlab.org or http://nlab.mathforge.org redirects to the home page of the nlab via a bit of Apache wizardry. The way it works at present is to specify the full domain name in the redirect, which is why it currently points to the mathforge one. I’ll reset that as well.
Not that I am really in a position to comment, but having a short, catchy URL is a great benefit to a website. Do you remember the full URL for the n-cafe? Well, maybe you do - I do too, but I had to consciously learn it, rather than have it slot neatly into a nice easy pigeonhole in my mind. I imagine that it helps for pagerank and other google trickery.
Why two? Easy: historical accident. Urs set up the nLab with the name http://ncatlab.org . Then I took over system administration at the time of the migration. Before migrating, I needed to test the set up and for that, I wanted a domain name. Easiest was to set up a new domain and work with that. I chose http://www.mathforge.org as an oblique reference to SourceForge. Since the mathforge machine can do more than just run the nLab (for example, it runs the itex->MathML server for the forum and it runs John’s new wiki), it seemed reasonable to hold on to the mathforge domain even when we’d transferred the ncatlab.org domain over. A domain name doesn’t cost much, and also it was wholly under my control (something that recent events showed to be a wise move!). So it’s less about future purposes and more about ensuring backward compatibility. Since we have so many links already to ncatlab.org, we’d need to keep control of that domain name even if we decided that the mathforge one should be the canonical one.
(Incidentally, after I’d chosen the domain name, I discovered that our esteemed hosts truncate the domain name to 8 characters to provide an account name. Given that it has been established that people recognise words very well even when the internal letters are mixed around, I often read that truncated name with the sixth and seventh characters switched. Ribbit.)
Just for the record, so that we all have the same information.
renting the domain “ncatlab.org” costs 12.95 dollars per year. So costs are not a problem.
While I finally did reach somebody at A2 who was capable and helpful and reactivated the domain, they still did not give me the “authorization code” of the domain, which we need to transfer it from A2 to some other company.
This is a ridiculous state of affairs, I know. But more ridiculous is the number of hours that I already spent on this, so I am currently willing to leave it at that. If anyone feels more energetic: I think you can all pretend to be me on the phone just as well as I can, so if somebody feels like calling the A2-hotline trying your luck on this…
@ Andrew #53: Have you done this yet? mathforge is still coming up as canonical, both from http://ncatlab.org/ and from this forum.
I would prefer that ncatlab.org be canonical, but also that it be assigned through a company that actually treats it right. If we revisit this in the summer, nothing should go wrong before then and Urs won’t be burnt out over it.
Just done it.
I agree with your last paragraph. But Urs should check that he’s not going to get charged for the attempt to transfer the hostname given that it wasn’t his fault that it didn’t happen.
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