I need suggestions. The gist of the problem is our Ubuntu server changes IP address at random times.

The router does not seem to reliably reserve an address for use by a specific computer in the DHCP service so I setup the Ubuntu machine with a static IP (x.x.x.3) outside of the DHCP range (x.x.x.4 to x.x.x.100). Then the web traffic is routed to x.x.x.3 by our router.

However when it appears the website is down, I run "ifconfig" to see if there are any problems with the interface and I find that the IP has changed to an address in the DHCP range. For instance last time it said "inet x.x.x.7".

To fix this I open the networking GUI and find that it says I am on my fixed address x.x.x.3. So to get this setting to take effect I disable the ethernet adapter in the GUI and then enable it again. When I go back to "ifconfig" it says my address is now x.x.x.3 again.

What the heck!?!? Why does it keep changing? Is there someplace ELSE where I need to disable DHCP or hard wire the IP address.

I'd like to say I'm sorry that the Blorwag has been down so much lately. We moved the server from the room with the router so now the server is connected using wifi.

For some reason our Airlink USB wifi adapter just bombs out randomly sometimes... We are trying to track down the problem but for now it just seems a bit off.

Also, the server may be down in the next few days as we transfer our domain from Registerfly.com which has lost their ICANN accreditation. I am still unsure how this will affect our DNS entries during the transition.

John said over at the twiki:

Is the blorwag that much of a failure that it needs replacing?
I thought it was a great format.

Actually, I too like the format. And it's fun to have your posts show up in my rss feed (except I don't get comment feeds).

Anyway, what I do not like is how slow the blorwag SPHPblog software is at generating the page content. I think the twiki should be much quicker. It is also more flexible for collaboration and allows more ability to upload files. I also like how you can each have your own account. We'll see how it goes. We can keep using this site until I figure out how to port it over and get things setup similarly.

I modified the RSS feed generator so if you add "?comments=1" at the end of the url, you will get the blog entry + any comments in the RSS feed.
Example http://james.harrisnotes.com/blorwag/rss.php?comments=1

Also, here is a new idea for how to show comments. The formatting leaves something to be desired but maybe it'd be a good way to be able to read comments + entries easily. Perhaps we could wrap up the comments in a similar script like the "Read More..." tag.

I added the capability to dynamically load the Read More text. Here are the instructions.