What's going on with the Anthrocon website? Funny you should ask...

[giza]

I'll tell you what's going on with the website. Straight from our provider:

22441. Power Failure (Pending Auto-Close)
Opened: 52 minutes ago	Updated: 4 minutes ago
Details: Our provider has had a significant power failure due to a malfunctioning breaker. They are working to repair it as quickly as possible. This affected all of our sites and services, as well as everything else in their building including their own sites, email, and phone systems. At this time they have restored power and we are working to bring all of our equipment back online. This includes performing a full filesystem check on our master fileservers, which will take some time. They have warned us that it is likely that they will need to interrupt power again in about an hour to replace the failed breaker. We are hoping that with added warning we can arrange a clean shutdown and avoid the need to restart the filesystem checks. We apologize for this issue and we are working as hard as we can to get everything back online as soon as possible while avoiding the chance that we'll end up right back here as soon as we finish.
Response: From: Jeff Date: 2007-07-17 13:09:43 We are working on configuring member sites to display a more useful error message while we wait for full service to be restored, and working on restoring full email and DNS service. We are also exploring the viability of renting a truck and just moving all our equipment to our new datacenter.

Wow, they' willing to rent a freaking truck to try and get their customers back online. Now that's some damn dedication.

Comments

[zorinlynx.livejournal.com]

So I assume this is an equipment failure between the UPS system and the server? Seems like a lousy place to have a single point of failure.

Of course, you might only get the redunancy you pay for. Dual power-feeds would probably cost you more. It's rare that circuit breakers malfunction!

Good luck and hope things come back soon :)

[giza.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure. It seems to be more of a datacenter issue since their own webservers and phone systems were affected as well. AFAIK, our webhost did due diligence on their end of things.

[duncandahusky.livejournal.com]

Yeah, based on the responses I was getting, I assumed it was something like this. Good to see they're willing to do anything necessary to get their customers back online. I've heard a lot of good things about nearlyfreespeech.net, and this bears that out.

[drzarron.livejournal.com]

Wow.. who is your hoster?

[giza.livejournal.com]

NearlyFreeSpeech (http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/)

They kick ass.

[kovucougar.livejournal.com]

We are also exploring the viability of renting a truck and just moving all our equipment to our new datacenter.

Unless they have a very small amount of equipment, the viability isn't that high. Not to mention the specialized equipment needed to safely move a chunk of hardware systems.. You can't just load them on a uhaul, your failure rate would be too high. Not to mention insurance costs. If they move them themselves, they likely don't have insurance on the hardware.

Smells like a "it sounds good so will generate good will but we don't have an intention to follow through" kind of statement.

I could be wrong though.

[giza.livejournal.com]

Their webhosting environment is clustered, so a few equipment failures wouldn't kill them. (Note that www.anthrocon.org has 3 IP addresses, for example)

It looks like that won't be happening though. It turns out that the "outage" was planned maintenance gone horribly wrong, and the data center did not inform their customers of any of this until after the fact.

Many customers are irate, to say the least.

wow!

[firehopper.livejournal.com]

thats really amazing, I agree what dedication :)

[sidepocket-pro.livejournal.com]

Its ze Furry Protestorz!

RUN!!!!

[netcrimes.livejournal.com]

Yowza. That IS customer service.

[nius.livejournal.com]

Planned maintenance gone horribly wrong

Hah, like the time that an idiot from the air conditioning vendor decided to flip the plastic cover and push the Big Red "EMERGENCY STOP" button on one of our PDUs, taking out half of System X?

Of the idiot from the UPS vendor who decided to put the datacenter into external bypass so he could tighten a bolt in the UPS, but hadn't activated the external bypass panel, so he shut down the entire DC at once? Then realized he goofed, and immediately turned it back on again?

Good times.

[girtygrin.livejournal.com]

I don't know if using a truck to move the internet would be a viable options considering its a series of tubes. :-P

gotta aggree

[ketrava.livejournal.com]

I have worked at a web hosting company before and this sounds like a smoke screen. If it is true that they had a power outage unless their systems were grossly under surge protected the backups should have had the system back within 24-48 hours Also they cannot have a special ERROR message if their entire system is down. Thats like saying the house blew down we will put a sign on the roof till we get it back up. The are prolly getting dossed or something that takes time to fix and don't want to own up to their vulnerability.

Re: gotta aggree

[giza.livejournal.com]

Please re-read the postings. In brief:

- This was not a surge protection issue, it was data center maintenance gone horribly wrong.

- 24-48 hours of downtime? Er, no. Their systems were back in 3-6 hours

- They never said their entire system was down. They did however state that not everything was running due to the outage.

- How can you make a special error message when machines are down? Two words: reverse proxy (http://www.squid-cache.org/).

- They've gotten DoSed before, and have been up front with us customers about it.