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Problems with DNI

by chet ~ December 31st, 2008. Filed under: Business Strategy.

As many of you know, our sister site, Defense and the National Interest (http://www.d-n-i.net) went down about a week ago, when it just quit.  I don’t think it was anything I did because it was working fine for at least a couple of days after my last post.

Our hosting service, Network Solutions, has found the problem and fixed it. Then they un-fixed it because they said that their service agreement doesn’t cover such things.

I couldn’t make this up if I tried.

Apparently there’s an invalid entry in something called a .htaccess file. I don’t work with such files and don’t know what it does or even where it is.

7 Responses to Problems with DNI

  1. Paul Bayer
    December 31st, 2008 at 6:37 am

    Hi Chet,

    .htaccess is a hidden configuration file, seating in the root directory of your site and used by the web server. With a FTP program you should be able to see it, if you set your preferences accordingly. If you have a backup of your site you could replace the current version with the saved one. Look into the root directory if there is yet a backupped version.

    If not, you should look for a webmaster, who can check and change it for you. Sometimes simply renaming the .htaccess to something else can help. This depends on whether .htaccess is needed for your configuration.

    Happy new year,
    Paul

  2. chet
    December 31st, 2008 at 8:37 am

    Paul –

    Thanks for the info. I’ve written back to NS (who have been very good up until this incident) asking them to simply fix it since they know what the problem is. Failing that, I’ll look for outside help.

    Best regards,Chet

  3. Roland Dobbins
    December 31st, 2008 at 8:53 am

    Why not move the whole thing over to a hosted solution like TypePad or WordPress.com and be done with it?

  4. chet
    December 31st, 2008 at 9:09 am

    Roland — That’s a very good question. We considered it, but DNI has a lot of legacy files left over from its pre-blog existence, and for that matter, chetrichards.com used to be belisarius.com. It was easier to keep them as they were and just drop the blog in. Network Solutions provides the ability to that as a very simple procedure. Of course, it does add another layer of complexity.

    Fabius Maximus, on the other hand, didn’t have so many files, so we set him up on WordPress.

    Chet

  5. Robert Paterson
    December 31st, 2008 at 9:54 am

    I have asked for help on Twitter Chet

  6. Lennie
    January 7th, 2009 at 2:22 pm

    Chet, if you still need help with this let me know and I should be able to fix it for you. I am a developer and webmaster.

  7. chet
    January 8th, 2009 at 6:06 am

    Lennie - thanks! Seems to be working OK now –if (when) we have more problems, I’ll be in touch.