Downtime with unet responding to pings

This morning, unet was down (thanks to @ymasur for reporting this). The machine was still running, responding to pings, but we couldn't log in or even access the machine locally. A reboot resolved this, which unfortunately the reason for this glitch is unknown.

In addition, we connected again the KVM, which at some point appeared not to be working. This was resolved by moving the machine meknes from port 4 to 3, as port 3 was unoccupied. It is possible the port 4 of the KVM is dysfunctional, or that the KVM doesn't expect to have an unused port (3) in between two used ports (2 and 4).

Could it be the UPS?

It looks like our aging UPS is failing, and when doing so, sometimes cuts the power to all the devices is serves. Indecently, this exactly is what UPS is supposed to prevent, but for its defense one is not supposed to run a UPS without replacing its rechargeable battery for... 10 years. We decommissioned this aging UPS, which might have been the cause for the recent periods downtime.

Machine off

For the second time in the last couple of months, the server has been down, and when looking at the problem we found that the machine was just turned off. It wasn't manually turned off by mistake, and we couldn't find anything useful in the logs. Also the temperature in the rack is not exceptionally high, which unfortunately may point to failing hardware.

Faster connection

Starting today, we switched Internet provider, from Speakeasy to Comcast Business, and as a result have a faster connection in the office and to the unet server. We used to have (in MBits/s) 0.75 up / 3 down, and now have 6 up / 33 down of actual bandwidth. This is 8 times more bandwidth for the uplink, and more than 10 times more downlink.

Because of this, the IP address of our DNS server changed, so you might be unable to access the server until the DNS configuration propagates. If you're still having some trouble accessing the server 24 hours after the date of this post, please let us know by adding a comment here.

Server Crash November 14-15

We had a server crash this weekend, probably on Saturday 14 (not Friday 13!). The server was restarted on Sunday morning (Pacific time), and all the service are now working again as expected. As far as we know, no data has been lost. The reason for the crash is unknown at this point, and we are still investigating.

Issues with DSL router

We're having persistent problems with our new DSL router, and are working with our provider to have this fixed. In the meantime we have put back our old router; it won't use the new DSL line to its full potential, but we hope that it will be more stable. We'll make sure to keep you updated on this.

Downtime Jul 3rd, 2009

Exactly one year of smooth sailing since your last post, I have to report that the server was down this morning. The issue was with our new DSL router which required a little push in the form of a reboot.