Roypercy

The title says it all. I really enjoyed being able to access the collection of bike catalogs. Hasn't worked for the last week.

francophile 

bulgie looks like you may need to update stuff again.


More info: https://www.bikeforums.net/classic-v...-net-down.html

bulgie 

Sorry man, my ISP is trying to wring more money from me. I have the cheapest bare-bones service, so they change my IP address now and then -- for no reason other than extortion money wringing. I have fixed it for now*, but of course it will keep happening.

*you may still find the site inaccessible if your system is still using the old IP address. Sometimes hitting Refresh will fix it, or you may have to wait and come back later. I have set my "time to live" at 1 hour, but not all systems respect that, some hold on to old info longer. A day should suffice for anyone.

I rely on you-all to tell me when it's down, because I will never notice on my own. Next time, don't wait a week please! I'd be much obliged if you would email me directly, address starts "mark@" and ends with "bulgier.net"

Thanks!
Mark B in Seattle

cudak888 

Mark, I pay for hosting servers for my sites - If it ever comes to the point that you find keeping your local server and ISP isn't worth it, I'd gladly host everything for you.

That is, of course, if you ever wish to take this route. No offense intended if you enjoy the freedom of running it on your own servers.

-Kurt

qcpmsame 

^^^ Good on you Kurt, well offered my friend. that is what this forum is all about.

Bill

bulgie 

Thanks for the kind offer! But since I need internet at home either way, this currently costs me nothing but some electricity to run the box it's on. I'm not sure why I like having the server sitting next to me on my desk, but for the time being, I just do...

Of course I could get hit by a bus any day, so I advise anyone who cares about this content to download and save it while it's up. Those who remember wooljersey.com know what I'm talking about.
I can also put all the catalog files on a microSD card and snail-mail it to anyone who wants it for $5. Email me if interested.

Mark B

Roypercy

Thanks, Mark! And thanks for keeping this invaluable service alive.

Roy

randyjawa 

Make no mistake about it, it does cost money to maintain a website. I came very close to terminating MY "TEN SPEEDS" simply because it costs me money every month. There was a time when I, sort of, broke even but no more, Perhaps Bulgier is strapped for bucks too. Just a thought.

Anyway, My "TEN SPEEDS" is up for one more year. Will figure out what to do when I am back in Canada..

Vintage_Cyclist

A potential option for online backup could be to load the catalogs onto the text section of the Internet Archive, which hosts a smattering of bicycle related catalogs and pretty much all manner of printed material.

For instance:

The Third Hand Catalog 1984-1985

VAR Catalogue Général 1970

cudak888 

I know what you mean, I run a fair number of home servers on my LAN and prefer it that way. Never did take it to the extent of running a website off one of them though.

I might take you up on that microSD card, just to have on hand in case I need to refer to the catalogs during an outage.

-Kurt

repechage

About a week ago I tried accessing it.
nada
tried .com riff on the site name- launched but advised not secure.
just tried today- both suffix come up but advised not secure. So assume older software running.
no problemo for me- just a report.

a great resource.

bulgie 

Thanks!

The "not secure" report indicates that it is http, not https, meaning traffic to and from the site is not encrypted. Someone with access to a system (e.g. router), on the path between you and me, could intercept and read the traffic. I am 100% OK with that! And I assume users of the website are too -- why would we care? Letting someone know you accessed a Motobecane catalog is not something that needs to be kept secret.

Making the site show as secure in your browser would require me to buy and maintain an SSL cert, which I did in the past when I ran my own email server, but it's just not worth it for this site. with no e-commerce, no sensitive data. If anyone can think of a reason I'm missing, I'm all ears. Oh I guess an SSL cert would also prove I am who I say I am, which would prevent an "evil twin" version of my site, that could deliver malware etc. But the hacker would have to go to some effort to fool you into going to the fake site. That scenario just seems so far-fetched, to try to snare my 15 unique users per year or whatever the number is. Hackers naturally go where the money is.

randyjawa said "Make no mistake about it, it does cost money to maintain a website." and "Perhaps Bulgier is strapped for bucks too."
Ha! Been running some version of this site since the '90s and so far I have made $10. One friendly BF'er sent me a Paypal, one time. But that's more than I have spent "maintaining" the website in all those years. I don't really maintain, I just barfed it up on the web and left it there... Least professionally-run website I've ever seen! But it truly is free as in zero (or single-digit?) cents per year, since all the expenses are things I would be paying for anyway if I didn't have a website. I mentioned electricity earlier, but the web server runs as a virtual machine on a box with other VMs, so that physical machine would be running regardless.

Oh about the "older software running" -- yes the OS is a few years old, but it is fully patched. All security-related patches are installed by an automated process as soon as they come out. Normally on a "real" server you want to install them manually after testing them, but I'm lazy and I don't mind unplanned reboots, so I just let them install as they come in. If a bad patch borks the server, no biggie, I have backups, local and cloud.

This is all off-topic, so probably further discussion should be private unless you see value in keeping it public. I prefer email over PMs. Take "mark@" and then add "bulgier.net". Or PMs are OK too if you'd rather.

Thanks all
-mb

Gary Fountain

My public - thanks Mark. Thanks for making the valuable information available. Thanks so much for maintaining your site too. I really can't count the number of times I have accessed your site to find answers to my many bike questions over the years. I very much appreciate your generosity.

I'm afraid I really don't comprehend anything involved maintaining such a site and I'm just starting to appreciate your concern for my own personal safety accessing your site. I do fully agree that who cares if someone else can see that I have looked at a Colnago catalogue - I think my personal dangers that accessing this information represents is really, really low.

ScottRyder 

Mark. I'm more than willing to share my collection of Fuji catalog scans that I'm slowing putting up on my blog. I noticed you only have 1976 posted and I have '72 thru '91. Since classicfuji.com is gone I'd feel better if they were somewhere else in case the bus comes too close.

https://classicfuji.posthaven.com/archive

Cheers,

Scott

bulgie 

Sure, thanks, that would be a good fit. Should I just try to hoover them up from that archive link, or is there another way? (Downloading each file separately sounds like too much work. Did I mention I'm lazy?) Can you maybe put them on an SD card and snail-mail it? I can send you the card. PM me if you want to talk methods, or email "mark@" plus "bulgier.net"

ScottRyder 

Mark, do you use DropBox? That would be the easiest and quick too.

Scott

bulgie 

Sure. I don't have a Drop Box account, but I can make one if you don't have one.
cheers
Mark

ScottRyder 

Mark, I'll drop you an email in the next few days.

Cheers,

Scott

cudak888 

ScottRyder - Try zipping the files and WeTransfering them.

-Kurt

ThermionicScott 

A thought just occurred to me: a daily background task to ping bulgier.net would catch when the IP address changed, right? Could be a pretty low-effort way to detect it automatically rather than when it fails to work for a user...

tricky 

The first couple services listed here offer free website uptime monitoring and alerting. I think I'll play with these to see if they work for some of my projects. https://geekflare.com/monitor-website-uptime/

francophile 

Honestly, the proper way to solve this isn't with monitoring, it's by using automated DDNS (dynamic DNS) through your home router/gateway/WAP/firewall, which would fix this problem automatically and not require any monitoring.

It's really not hard. Just check that list/of/devices up in my last sentence at your house to see which supports DDNS. Setup an account with one of the services they support (if necessary). They should have you pick a hostname from a list of domains they own and make available for account holders. Like, with DynDNS they have the entire "homeip.net" domain available for subdomain registration, so there you could pick "bulgier.homeip.net" as yours, and you'd assign that hostname to point at your current external IP address for your house.

Once that's done, only two basic steps:

First, go to your domain registrar to update DNS records, specifically you need to CNAME alias the "bulgier.net" root record (and probably www record) to the DDNS hostname you chose at the DDNS provider. Basically what this will when anyone tries to look up "bulgier.net", they'll be forwarded to your provider to look up "bulgier.homeip.net", which will then point them to your current registered home IP address.

Second, go to your router/gateway/firewall and configure that device to automatically update the DDNS service with its current external IP on a regular non-spammy schedule like every 15mins. This is usually less than 1-2 clicks and three or four text-input boxes to accomplish, basically you need to tell it which DDNS service you're using, give the subdomain, then your username and password (and sometimes a schedule setting).

Doing things this way - the proper way for home and non-business and/or any non-static IP service - no matter how many times the IP changes - could be 15 times a day - the site will never be down for more than 15 minutes, it will restore once your device processes the DDNS automatic update on whatever schedule you set.

The only warning I'll give you is this: DO NOT update every 60 seconds or less. A lot of DDNS providers will blacklist your IP, disable your account, or any other number of things if you cause too much traffic

And Mark, if you need help setting this up, give me a shout. I've been an engineer doing this type of crap for two decades.

FWIW, almost every home router in existence supports DDNS auto-update. There are a number of free services out there, last I checked. I've personally been using DynDNS for a decade or more, but there's probably plenty more out there.

bulgie 

I did use DynDNS, for a few years until they told me it wasn't free anymore. They were going to start charging me. Is it still free for you?

And thanks for all the advice and help you've offered, much appreciated.
-mb

francophile 

Long and short? Oracle bought them out in the mid-2010s. They asked me for money in 2014, gave me 25% off, I paid $67.50 and they didn't ask me for money again until last year, they wanted $100 for 2 more years, but I had some offer for another 10% off from who-knows-where and ended up paying $89. My service w/Oracle will expire next year and I'll probably finally get off my ass and move elsewhere, the current setup with DynDNS is just too convenient for me, honestly, so I was OK with the initial $67 for the 5 years, but when they came back with the new $40/yr garbage a few months ago, it left a bad taste in my mouth, I just didn't have time to reconfigure all of the remote systems I use the service with. It's a write-off for me anyway, but ... still!

You should know DynDNS (now Oracle) isn't the only fish in the sea, ever since residential internet-connected CCTV became a thing 10-15 years ago, DDNS exploded and everyone - especially WAP and CCTV manufacturers - was hopping in the game. Example: I just logged into my Netgear WAP upstairs, it supports three different providers: DynDNS.org, NETGEAR DDNS, noip.com. Checking my commercial firewall, which is a bit dated, it supports DDO and DynDNS. FreeDNS is a huge provider a lot of home users rely on.

But you should also know you don't need to rely on your network devices to manage this for you. Back in the days before P2P filesharing became a thing, DDNS existed then also so us geeks could use home FTP and WWW servers. The free providers back then had an agent/service you can install on your server or any system inside your house, and it will periodically ping their service to get your existing external IP. I can't imagine that doesn't still exist with the free providers out there.

bulgie 

My firewall is enterprise-oriented and doesn't have any free DDNS providers built-in. It's hard-coded to use dyn.com only. My "router" is in bridge mode, with my external IP applied to the firewall.
Yes, that's why and how I used Dyn for years -- agent running on a workstation in the LAN. I guess I should do a little research on free DDNS providers -- I owe it to my adoring public.

Thanks again for the added background.