Downtime on Wednesday December 27th, 2006

The server was down for a few hours this morning. Only connectivity was lost for a few hours, and restarting the DSL modem this morning did the trick. This may or may not have been related to a nice storm we had in the area yesterday night.

Downtime on Sunday October 22nd, 2006 for hardware upgrade

One of the disks of our RAID array started failing last week. The server can still run with one disk down, but this put us at the risk of loosing data if one more disk failed. So replacing that disk became a priority. Instead of just replacing the faulty disk, we decided to replace all the drives. This improves reliability overall and since we bought bigger disks, as a side effect it also doubles our storage capacity.

And this is not the end of the story: instead of installing the disks on the old server, Julien installed them a slightly faster spare machine. This should give use slightly better performance, but more importantly the new 2 U rack-mounted server now fits much more nicely in our rack.

The server was down Sunday and during part of the night from Sunday to Monday (Pacific Time) to allow for this upgrade.

Downtime for a few hours on Tuesday Jun 14th

Our DSL line was down for a few hours yesterday. The connection came back up as we were trying to figure out what exactly the problem was.

Delay problem with FTP, SMTP, and Others Solved

Julien solved a delay problem that impacted a number of services, in particular FTP and SMTP. The effect was a long delay to connect to the FTP server or send an email through SMTP. The cause was wrong DNS configuration on the server itself; that is for the DNS servers used by services running on the server, not with the unet public DNS servers. I think we are all glad to see this problem finally fixed. Thank you Julien!

Update on "Server Down For the Day"

The problem mentioned in the last entry was resolved the same day, and was apparently due to an issue with the network card. A reboot of the server resolved the problem.

Server Down For the Day

The server will be down today. The machine shut down after a disk failure on hdi1. As I brought it up this morning, everything starts properly, except there seems to be a problem with the network. Julien will stop by later today to figure this out, so the server will be down today at least until this evening (PST).

Downtime Saturday March 4th

The server was shutdown remotely by this Saturday early in the morning (PST). We have been able to restart the machine only in the evening, so the server was down for part of the day. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Downtime Scheduled For DSL Maintenance

Speakeasy, our DSL provider, has informed us that they have a maintenance scheduled on our DSL connection during the night from Tuesday (Jan 10) to Wednesday (Jan 11), starting at midnight and ending at 4 a.m.

Server Moved

As some of you have already noticed, the server has now been moved to its new location. Thanks to Julien, Thomas, and to anyone who have helped with this.

Moving the unet server

The server might be moved tonight or tomorrow night to its final destination. So prepare for a downtime and we'll keep you updated when the server is back up.

Speed of the DSL Line

Click on the image to see the result of a quick connection speed test for our new DSL line. Note that I ran this from my laptop while the line was also used by other services, so this only poorly reflects the actual capacity of the line.

DSL and Rack Installed

Julien and Thomas have been working last week and this weekend to setup our rack and hook up to the DSL line in our new location. The Orbeon servers have been moved into the rack and connected to the new line. The unet server will be next!

DSL Installed

Our new DSL 1.5/768 connection through SpeakEasy is up, ready for unet and number of other servers. We'll schedule a day for the migration and continue to keep everyone updated through this blog.

Progress with DSL

Good news: a technician will come on Thursday this week (October 20th) to connect a fast DSL connection in our new location. Once the new DSL is up we'll be able to move unet in our new location, which will offer a larger bandwidth and a better environment for the server. Stay tuned!

Correction (Oct 20): I should have written Thursday instead of Tuesday. The date was correct through.

unet moved

The unet server has been moved to a new location last Thursday. Things have been going back to normal over the weekend and have settled down by now. If you still notice anything iffy, just let us know. There will be another downtime in about two weeks as the server is moved to its final location.