Folks, I’m sorry, ok.
I wasn’t ignoring you intentionally, I promise.
To everyone that has left a comment on one of the blogs (Collaboration Matters, Quickr Blog, Connections Blog or Symphony Blog) in the last couple of months, I am really sorry I didn’t see your comment and therefore didn’t respond. Normal service has now been resumed.
Why didn’t I see the comments?
Back in October, I moved all the blogs onto a new hosted Linux-based server. Thanks to the power of Domino, that’s just a matter of replicating the blog DBs, updating the website documents and changing a couple of parameters in each blog DB (where the agents run for example). All seemed to be ok, though initially I did have some performance issues. However, once these were sorted all has seemed to be ok – creating new posts, updating existing ones, accessing the blog and using the web admin for example.
However, I did notice a drop in comments, but just put that down to the general wealth of content in the Lotus blogosphere and perhaps less interested in my posts, plus I have been maniacally busy myself since that time. Then yesterday a user reported that they had received the message “Form processed” when adding a comment. I hadn’t received an email notification of the comment so went looking in the blog DB, and there was the comment plus loads of others I hadn’t seen.
On investigating, the blog server log was showing these messages:
12/04/2008 09:55:00 AM Error connecting to server blogs/collaborationmatters: The remote server is not a known TCP/IP host.
and this was appearing each time a comment was left.
To cut a long story short, part of the process of leaving a comment requires a server to connect to itself, and whilst the server document for this server and all DNS were correct, it couldn’t make that connection – hence whilst the comment was being added to the blog DB, no notifications were being sent, the users were not being redirected back to the post and the comment counts were not being incremented. A swift ‘rep blogs.collaborationmatters.com’ sorted out the connection, and suddenly the server could process comments again. The “Form processed’ message disappeared, and I received an email notification. To make absolutely sure, I also Domino Blog’s options to ‘Rebuild all Comment Counts’ and ‘Rebuild Site Indexes’.
So once again, sorry for not responding to your comments, hopefully I’ve caught up now. If not, just ping me by email or on Twitter.
