Canadian Mysteries

There were seven sites whose teachers' guide home page (e.g.
http://www.canadianmysteries.ca/teachers/guides/vinland/indexen.html) had links in the left column which pointed to files in a non-existent "keyconcepts" folder (e.g. the link to primary documents pointed to http://canadianmysteries.ca/teachers/keyconcepts/3513en.html).

I changed each of those links so they point to a file in the en or fr folder at the root of the site, because those folders appear to contain the correct files (e.g. the link to primary documents now points to http://canadianmysteries.ca/en/3513.php).

The one remaining oddity is that the teachers' guide home pages for those sites uses the black background and not the current blue background. I'm not sure how much work it would be to rewrite those pages so they use the blue "skin" rather than the "black" one.

Previously
admin@canadianmysteries.ca
feedback@canadianmysteries.ca
webmaster@canadianmysteries.ca
were listened for at uvic, which re-addressed them to admin@canadianmysteries.org
feedback@canadianmysteries.org
webmaster@canadianmysteries.org

We earlier agreed on a plan to cut the .org addresses out of the loop (as part of the extraction from synergy services hosting), and over the last few weeks have have been trying to put that into action. The sysadmins tell me that those three canadianmysteries.ca email accounts are now being readdressed to mystery@uvic.ca (which is as planned).

The only oddity left is that MF reports that messages aren't appearing in the way she expects, but I can't really figure out what is the problem.
I've also discovered and reported to her that synergy has renewed the hosting and dinged JL's credit card, so it's up to them to reverse that.

As of October 7, we've got the domain registration settings we want for canadianmysteries.ca and mysterescanadiens.ca Specifically: Domain name: canadianmysteries.ca Domain status: registered Creation date: 2003/05/29 Expiry date: 2014/05/29 Updated date: 2012/10/04 Registrar: Name: Can Reg (Infinet Communications Group Inc.) Number: 146 Name servers: dns1.uvic.ca 142.104.6.1 dns2.uvic.ca 142.104.80.2 Domain name: mysterescanadiens.ca Domain status: registered Creation date: 2003/05/29 Expiry date: 2014/05/29 Updated date: 2012/10/04 Registrar: Name: Can Reg (Infinet Communications Group Inc.) Number: 146 Name servers: dns1.uvic.ca 142.104.6.1 dns2.uvic.ca 142.104.80.2

I had to "unlock" the accounts before they could be transferred. There is an obscure setting in the configuration panel that controls this.

The last step in transferring the domains from sibername.com to canreg.com was to obtain an "auth code" for each of those domains and send them to canreg which they'd then include in the transfer request to sibername (presumably the auth code somehow shows that the request is coming from the actual owner of the account).

Canreg.com put in the transfer request and was told by sibername the the "transfer lock" on each domain had to be removed by the owner of the account. So, I logged in again to the sibername admin interface, clicked on manage domain name, clicked on the domain and then found a un/lock button at the top of the window (beside the auth code button I used in the last step). Unlocked each of the domains. Sibername guys might have included that detail.

The never-ending saga of trying to get the domain name registration service moved from sibername to the registration service favoured by UVic (canreg.ca) continues. Sibername insists that a request in a very specific form has to come from the registered owner (JL) and not from anyone else. I got all the requirements and had JL send that request to sibername. Three weeks later a WHOIS enquiry shows that sibername is still the registration service. This is ridiculous. Obviously Sibername has no interest in giving up their involvement in that domain name easily.

The email addresses admin@canadianmysteries.ca and feedback@canadianmysteries.ca were being directed to JL's email, MF wanted them pointed at her email, so I did that. As Sibername is still somehow in the hosting mix, I had to go through their admin interface to do it.

After a couple of tries, managed to get into the domain hosting account for canmys on sibername. It shows that UVic is the primary and secondary domain name server, so there should be no further problems with http requests finding their way to the instance on Synergy servers.
Greg and I aren't sure about the implications for email addresses, so have asked to talk to someone in sysadmin who knows about this kind of thing to confirm that email addresses too are sent to UVic and not synergy. We already know uvic is listening for them.

MF noticed that on image archive pages in which some of the descriptive texts for images was very long, the layout of the page was compromised (text and images overlayed). After some poking around, I noted an anomaly in the css which constrained the size of the containing div around an image+description, but allowed the text to overrun. Modified that so the containing box would grow with the text.

User noted that https://canadianmysteries.ca... threw up a security warning. The certificate is actually on the canadianmysteries.uvic.ca domain and not the canadianmysteries.ca domain (long story involving it being purchased through systems and thus part of the uvic.ca domain name). Got user to try using the http protocol and the domain name with uvic in it, but still he couldn't get through, so I suspect some kind of security setting on his machine or network was also in play.

Ended up sending him the visible text of those files as attachments to an email, so at least he had that, which is all he wanted.

Nobody else has ever complained about this, so I don't think I'll do anything more.