NavList:

Donations for NavList welcome: contribute to Navlist operations here.

Beginning in early July, the NavList web site was subjected to a peculiar, intermittent problem involving a full "queue" for internal web connections. This led to a large number of odd symptoms that did not on the face of it appear to have a common source. Some of you may have seen cases where the list of messages was missing from the main NavList page, replaced by a message that said "try again in a few minutes". A couple of posts emailed to the standard address for the group also seem to have gone missing, though I think they were all caught eventually. 

Communicating an intermittent problem to web-hosting technical support is an uphill battle. At first, they didn't believe me and directed me to introductory pages on web site management. Yeah, great. Then they agreed that there was a problem, but it was my fault. I, however, suspected that this was a case where shared hosting was causing some issue. In "shared hosting", which is normal for smaller web sites, dozens, even hundreds, of web sites are hosted on the same physical computer in some server space, in our case in California somewhere. This is normally fine, but it can sometimes lead to conflicts between sites on the same server. Eventually tech support agreed that there was something wrong, but they needed evidence. This is a huge problem with an intermittent bug since it has usually gone away on its own by the time you can point it out. I crafted a test app that would do nothing but look for the problem and report it when it happened. Tech support soon agreed that this was due to some problematic web site on the same server, and they agreed to track it down. They were unable to do so. Tech support then offered to do what they could have done a month ago: move us to another physical server. This happened today around 2:00 pm Eastern, and I monitored the transition to make sure the many gigabytes of NavList files were moved, proper permissions were set, and so on. This transfer requires "DNS updates" which means that some of you may need to reset devices to get them to point to the new server. The web address for the NavList message boards has not changed. It's still fer3.com/arc. It's the behind-the-scenes address that has been moved. If you see a "not found" message in the next few hours, try powering down, reseting internet connections, etc. (UPPBI... unplug, plug back in). It does appear that this peculiar problem is, at last, resolved.

I spent many hours on this issue. Therefore I am asking for donations again despite the fact that we're a little ahead of schedule. 
Donate for NavList operations here. Please note: if you have contributed in the past year, you've done your part, and I thank you very much. Thank you all very much for any help you can offer.

Frank Reed
Centennia Software: fer3.com, ReedNavigation.com, HistoricalAtlas.com, etc.
Conanicut Island USA