August 14th, 2003:

Apparently, there are currently major power outages in the Northeast affecting New York City, Cleaveland and Detroit.

Does anyone know how or why?

Update @3:39pm: BoingBoing is reporting this as is the front page of CNN.com.

Update @3:41pm: It appears that Ottawa and Toronto are also having problems.

Update @3:42pm: Reuters has the story too with no additional information.

Update @3:49pm: Canoe news of Canada also has the story. Still no new information.

Update @3:54pm: Ashlee says a Consolidated Edison plant blew up.

Update @3:56pm: CNN says the Niagara-Mohawk Power Grid overloaded. Officials don’t believe the outage is related to terrorism.

Update @3:59pm: CNN has a developing story.

Update @4:03pm: NPR’s Cory Flintoff just reported on KERA 90.1 on the outage. WNYC’s Kari Nolan reported that all 5 bouroughs are out of power. Parts of Long Island and parts of New Jersey are also affected. An amusement park in New Jersey has left people stranded on the rides. In Manhattan, Cellphones are all jammed, and all traffic lights are out. This has hit right at the beginning of their evening rush hour. Albany, NY also saw power loss, however, it has been restored. On the East side of Lower Manhattan a Consoldidated Edison power station is on fire.

Update @4:07pm: CBC has the story as well.

Update @4:08pm: NPR’s Melissa Bloc is now reporting that the cause of the outage is the Manhattan fire.

Update @4:08pm: Jess just called from Sudbury, Ontario. They don’t have power there either. Been out for almost an hour.

Update @4:10pm: The overloaded power grid has caused power stations to shut down in an automatic and preventative fashion, as they are programmed to do. The fire in Manhattan is due to a problem with the automatic shutdown. In 1965, the north eastern United States and all of eastern Canada lost power for 13 hours.

Update @4:15pm: ABCNews, Washington Post, Herald Tribune, InternetNews.com, NBC4, KCTV5.

Update @4:38pm: In looking for information about the United States power grid, I learned something odd. The power grid is divided into three pieces: the East (which includes parts of Canada) the West (which includes parts of Canada) and Texas. I guess people don’t want to share with us. Or, maybe the other way around.

mod_vdbh for Apache answers my Apache configuration issues. With this in place, Apache doesn’t need to be HUPed upon configuration changes, and all of the configuration data can be stored in the MySQL database, which means there is no need to write configuration files. I’m not sure how fast it is, but it sounds good. It would, however, be some hefty overhead of the MySQL database were hit on EVERY request. I’ll have to look into that.

The only downside is that it requires Apache 2.0. I have yet to make the big plunge to 2.0… though I’m sure I should any time now.

After digging a little deeper into the world of Linux software that I’ve been avoiding for so long, I’ve come up with a few solutions. I’ve found MySQL interfaces for postfix, an SMTP server, courier, and IMAP/POP server, and mydns, a DNS server. I simply have to write web interfaces that use these MySQL tables to allow users to edit their own information. It won’t be THAT difficult. However, that still means that new shell accounts and new virtually hosted websites will have to be created manually. This isn’t so bad, as that means only new domains (rare) and new shell accounts (even rareer) have to come through me. However, I’m sure I’ll cook up something for that too.

I’m going to work on the web interface for SMTP, IMAP/POP, and DNS today. I’ve found existing MySQL interfaces for 2 of them, which means that stealing and/or modifying from them should be a piece of cake. I’ve also seen a MySQL module for PAM, so maybe user creation can be handled via MySQL as well. We’ll see.