Ndenyal: Blog

My story, "Emma Comes in From the Cold," somehow got marked complete. Not sure how. Anyway, it continues with a new chapter appearing later today. I hope I fixed it. For those who wrote, thanks for pointing out the problem.

It's in the queue now and I assume it'll appear soon. From my informal poll of readers, a chapter will appear every other day until it's all up (the story is complete).

The site's not dead--just not reachable via the normal DNS (Domain Name Server) resolution function of the internet. Somehow it's screwed up for ASSTR, possibly reminiscent of what I kind of mention in my "Kevin and Denise NiS" story. (Or see at the bottom of this post for another possibility.)

Anyway, there's a geeky fix to help you access the site. The following is courtesy of Chris Haily, transmitted by Tim Merrigan, with additions by Y Lee Coyote:

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The ASSTR server is indeed alive, but the host name is not resolving to the IP address. Why, I'm not sure, but it is definitely the case.

The IP address is 64.71.155.222. In my experience, if I just put this IP in my browser, I get a 403 error. However, if I add the IP address to my hosts file, BAM, access.

This isn't all that helpful for people who are unaware of the magic trick, but it does work, for those of you who might want to try it. The windows hosts file is at c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts, Linux is /etc/hosts, I don't know about mac or how to do this on phones at this point, but open the hosts file in a text editor and add the lines:

64.71.155.222 www.asstr.org
64.71.155.222 asstr.org
64.71.155.222 sftp.asstr.org
64.71.155.222 status.asstr.org

And you will be able to access ASSTR again. You will most likely get a security warning because the certificate is out of date, but there's no harm in clearing that and proceeding to the site.

Those of you who are interested, you can also FTP into the site using this IP address.

A couple of points:
1- You must be in administrative mode
2- Make sure you have write access to the file
3- ZoneAlarm, for one, "locks" the file so under the firewall, go to settings and advance settings.

Further info from "B S":

The registrar (google) has added a "Server hold" to the domain (https://icann.org/epp#serverHold). ...

The domain also seems to have "serverRenewProhibited", "serverTransferProhibited", "serverUpdateProhibited", and "serverDeleteProhibited" on it. It's possible that there's an innocuous reason for them, but in combination with the hold it's also possible that there's some legal or law enforcement action that led Google to lock it down.

I've been working on this one for about three months and it's currently with my beta readers. Hope to have it back in a week or so. It's about 20 chapters. I think it's different from any other one in the entire universe.

Question: Which is better for posting? All at once or a chapter every (name a time period: two days, week, etc).

I can't promise that I'll follow everyone's wishes, obviously. Hey, I might not even go with the majority. Not fair? You're right.

I've heard that a few readers had some difficulty reading my written rendition of the Cockney and Birmingham dialects. I agree; it's not so easy to read. So to help future readers in understanding the dialog, I've added a supplement to Chapter 9 giving the "translation." Hope it helps you.