LJ server move confirmed

Thanks to a heads-up from madfilkentist, I can now confirm that LJ's servers were, in fact, moved to Moscow. The lag was presumably due to DNS propagation delay, which sometimes takes up to a week.

Geolocation data from IP2Location (Product: DB6, updated on 2016-12-5)
    Domain Name	     	  	Country		     	Region	City
    mdlbear.livejournal.com	Russian Federation 	Moskva	Moscow
    ISP					Organization	Latitude	Longitude
    Rambler Internet Holding LLC	Not Available	55.752220153809	37.615558624268
    (End of the road for LiveJournal [The Mad Filkentist])

See also my previous post on the topic, mdlbear | Dirty deeds afoot on LJ

One thing I forgot to mention: after you've set up an account on Dreamwidth, you should claim your Livejournal OpenId. That links your DW and LJ identities, so that anyone importing data from LJ will see comments as coming from your DW account even if you wrote them on LJ.

Recently noticed

Just in case you were wondering just how private your LJ is now that the server's in Moscow, we have:

  : wget https://mdlbear.livejournal.com
    --2016-12-30 16:59:04--  https://mdlbear.livejournal.com/
    Resolving mdlbear.livejournal.com (mdlbear.livejournal.com)... 81.19.74.1
    Connecting to mdlbear.livejournal.com (mdlbear.livejournal.com) [...]
    HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently
    Location: http://mdlbear.livejournal.com/ [following]
    --2016-12-30 16:59:11--  http://mdlbear.livejournal.com/

... which means they are deliberately downgrading the connection from https to http. Wouldn't surprise me if blocking Dreamwidth is next.