This site’s database failed late at night on Sept. 11th.  The admin was on vacation and unfortunately the site was down for a week.  It is still unclear whether the database failure was organic or malicious.  However, an unauthorized admin account was created listing:  jyoti_anju2000@yahoo.com.

Just before the site went down an unresolved IP (that didn’t include Bulgarian, Indian, or Chinese net providers) was:

(unresolved ip)    Pages    Hits    Bandwidth    Last visit

217.169.236.12    25    408    4.75 MB    11 Sep 2009 – 03:22
ISP:    Defensie Telematica Organisatie
Country:    Netherlands
City:    Maasland

What is also interesting is the high level of hits received on Sept. 17th while the site was inactive:

89.111.144.26    67    442    9.54 MB    17 Sep 2009 – 13:17
ISP:    Garant-Park-Telecom
Organization:    Garant-Park-Telecom
Country:    Russian Federation
City:    Moscow

12.47.208.86    111    369    7.42 MB    17 Sep 2009 – 02:21
ISP:    AT&T WorldNet Services
Organization:    GOLDMAN SACHS COMPANY
Country:    United States
State/Region:    NY
City:    New York

This marks another record month for Dutch spies visiting GTM.    Read all about them here.  So was the database crash accidental or intentional?

[Update: 9/20]

After going through months of logs it appears an RSS error caused a recurring failure that eventually overloaded the database.  This doesn’t explain the peculiar email address fixed to a new admin account, but it explains the crash.

This is another slam piece.  That’s right I said it!  Time to slam Blogger.

After bleeding good hours of life away using Blogger’s clunky time consuming editors I give up.  The really detailed and informative articles you expect from GTM were taking hours to format, due to spacing issues within Blogger.  What really broke the straw was editing code for a new and professional site theme.  Blogger was pushed beyond its performance envelope.  There went that weekend!  Ye horribly interesting…  Sometimes you gotta go for the pity points.

Based on these experiences GOOG qualifies as a new and more meaningful short candidate.  [sorta joking]

So we’re moving on.  This site is now officially run on the WordPress platform hosted by Inmotion.com.  The transfer was unbelievably fast and easy.  Faster than Blogger’s own internal .blogspot.com transfers even!   This is way worth the $95 fee in saved time, hassle, frustration, and peace of mind.  The flexibility of this setup is awesome.

You can now look forward to a new an improved site with a slick interface by the end of February (work in progress).  There is a vision of what GTM should look like and we will reach that vision!