Server Downtime

[nrc]

Sorry about the unannounced downtime. We were not given any notice. The good news is that we're back online, the bad news is, not for long.

Our once reliable hosting company was bought earlier this year and has decided to move servers around. We expect another 12 hours of downtime starting at 7PM this evening.

More details later.

[DagoFast]

Hey as long as the once reliable server company wasn't bought by a dysfunctional company :gomer: owned by a certain dysfunctional family :tony: in Indiana, I'm OK with it. :D

[nrc]

Here's the whole story.

Earlier this year the company that hosts Off Camber was purchased by another hosting company. Earlier his month they sent out a notice that they would be moving all their servers to a different data center as part of that. Unfortunately they sent the message from the new hosting company's email address. That address was not on my email whitelist so the notice was thrown out as spam.

The downtime for the move is scheduled to start tonight between 8PM and 4AM and should be complete within 15 hours of the start. The window is a bit vague because they'll be moving things a rack at a time. They're moving the servers from Miami to Tampa so that's the reason for the long outage.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) someone at the hosting company decided to go ahead and change a bunch of network stuff prior to the move. That's what created the outage starting yesterday. They assigned our server a new IP and I've updated the DNS entry for offcamber.net to reflect this. Unfortunately the TTL (basically the refresh time) on the DNS entry was set to 24 hours so some users may not get the new information before our next downtime starts.

My understanding is that this new IP address will be permanent, but I've reduced the TTL to three hours in case we end up with more problems and need to make changes. I have not updated the DNS for offcamber.org so that domain will be down until the move is complete.

Fortunately this outage caused us to discover the plan for the move starting tonight so we were able to make appropriate backups in case the truck with our server ends up in a swamp somewhere.

We're debating on whether to send an email notice about the outage since some users may not be able to get to the system to see this notice prior to tonight's outage. We'll see how many folks get in between now and this evening and decide.

[devilmaster]

whew! shakes averted....

but 14 hours more?!? shakes coming back.......


;)

[WickerBill]

Yeah no kidding, and on a Friday even, when I'm at work trying to avoid anything resembling work!

[nrc]

Now the suspense is killing me.

[devilmaster]

well, it doesn't look like the truck went into the ditch..... :cool:

[Mark521]

I had problems "finding the site" about a hour or so ago, but its working now. I guess you are up at the new location (or the move is going much more slowly than planned).

[nrc]

The site went down around 10PM and came back at 10:30AM. Hopefully everything will be stable now until I decide to break things with an update later this summer. :)

[Cam]

Are we in Tampa?

[nrc]

Are we in Tampa?

Yep.

[nissan gtp]

wow, I can see it all the way from here :thumbup:

[KLang]

Hey, can we see the shuttle launches from here? ;)

[WickerBill]

No, unfortunately, we're at the bottom of the rack, so we can't see anything. We're stuck staring at the tape monkeys' feet from the front and everyone's cables in the back.

[nrc]

As it turns out we were fortunate. Thre are quite a few folks still waiting for their servers to come back. Unfortunately I'll probably end up having to move our hosting again if this is the kind of service they new owner provides. :\