WHAT A FREAKING MESS

[Sean]

We've just had a big outage due to the total failure of the server's hard drive. Then the ISP restored the server and changed the ip's and dns (how people find the site). I figure everyone outside the US is getting this glitter children page when going to apug.org!! I am doing very good to contain my rage right now. I am so sick of this :x The only way I am on the site right now is because my work pc connects to the net via the US and not NZ. I've given the isp many chances lately, mainly because to move the entire site to a new ISP will be quite an ordeal. I'm currently investigating ISP's and will in the next few weeks after thorough research, hand pick one. My wish list is servers running redundant disk systems such as raid, 24x7 phone support, similar cost, etc. One company I am looking at seems to have this and claims in the event of a total server outage they can have the site back up within 2 hours. I think this last outage was 12hrs or so, totally unacceptable and enough is enough. Will keep everyone posted. Thanks, Sean

 

[Ole]

Well, I was getting desperate there for a while, but I'm back in now! No more Glitterchildren, I hope...

 

[FrankB]

You never miss something until it's gone! Welcome back, Sean!

...and may you never be mistaken for a glitter child again!

 

[David A. Goldfarb]

Welcome back. StrawberryYoga was kind of interesting...


...or maybe not.

 

[Black Dog]

Just the odd sparkle for me-apug is made up as they say in Liverpool!

 

[Thomassauerwein]

Go get them Sean I've grown accustom to hanging out here. Maybe they don't understand theirs a difference between a server from "down" under and a server thats "down"? Alright I'm the only one that thinks thats funny, Good luck!

 

[Jorge]

I thought bubba (AKA Amelia) decided to play with our code and make herself a new site....

 

[Jorge]

As a matter of fact, now that I think about it, you should make bubba the oficial APUG mascot and have a picture of her in the home page....what do you all think?

 

[Sean]

lol

As a matter of fact, now that I think about it, you should make bubba the oficial APUG mascot and have a picture of her in the home page....what do you all think?

 

[Lex Jenkins]

Hmm...I figgered it was just me. Couldn't connect to APUG, photo.net or my e-mail accounts all day. Turned out all three were unrelated problems that occurred simultaneously. Damned fickle internet.

 

[Eric Rose]

It's probably the most hits the glitterchildren have ever had in 1 day!

 

[Sean]

Well, I'm investigating this company:

http://www.lunarpages.com

they have a plan that will give us 800meg disk, 60gig bandwidth, 24x7 phone support, have a huge redundant datacenter, and all their servers are Dell PowerEdge 2650 servers with dual Xeon 2.8Ghz processors and a good raid array (means if a disk dies the site should still be ok). They pride themselves on customer support and pro-active monitoring of the environment (rather than letting it break, then trying to fix it). I've been scouring the net and can't find bad press about them. People really seem to rave about them.

They have their own customer forums too:

http://www.lunarforums.com

Which says to me they have nothing to hide. No provider in their right mind would have customer forums if their service was bad, it would put them out of business. I have been going through their forums and can't seem to find anything but praise for their level of customer support.

If everything continues to check out, I will register with them. Then I'll need to lock the forums on apug. Transfer the site over and get it running (the fun part), transfer the dns to the new site, re-activate the apug forums, cancel the old provider. It can take a few days for global dns to update so we would basically have a locked apug site for around 1-2 days.

 

[brimc76]

Good to have you back! I had made a few changes to my pc and tried to log on to the site a bit later and just kept getting a message saying I couldn't go there. I was sure it was something I had deleted and I had totally screwed up my program.

 

[Eric Rose]

I tried to go to the mechanics page and it took quite awhile for it to load up. Also I noticed they are not doing their own DNS work. I would try and find out some users names that have sites of a similar load characteristic of ours and find out how they are doing with these people.

The forum itself doesn't hold much water as they could populate that themselves and/or make sure nothing of a negative nature stays on it.

What's your current bandwidth requirements per month?

 

[ian_greant]

Don't feel bad Sean. photo.net has been down all day too.
I'm rather disappointed though. *I* didn't get to see the glitterchildren!

All kidding aside, if you need a little help checking around for a new ISP feel free to ask. I'm sure any of us would be glad to lend a hand.

We appreciate all your work.

Cheers,
Ian

 

[David A. Goldfarb]

For those who are curious about what APUG looked like in warped cyberspace, go to www.glitterchildren.com.

Sean, where did the quick reply box go? I liked that feature.

 

[Sean]

Hi, we lost a few mods when I did the upgrade from 2.0.4 to 2.0.6. I plan to put them back this w-end.

For those who are curious about what APUG looked like in warped cyberspace, go to www.glitterchildren.com.

Sean, where did the quick reply box go? I liked that feature.

 

[Sean]

here's a response i got from someone on lunarforums:

"I personally don't have a busy site like yours, but from what I have seen there is no problem at all. This site lunarforums.com is hosted on one of the same servers other customers are hosted on. It receives quite a bit of trafic, and doesn't appear to slow down at all.

Another site you might want to check out is mindcollisions.com (operated by one of the admins here). Its fairly high traffic, and hosted here as well.

There are tech support people working 24/hrs to monitor lunarpages hosting. If something goes wrong there are backup servers ready to replace failing systems at a moments notice. These are NICE servers as well (you can find the specs at lunarpages.com). Hard drives are RAID 5 arrays, so one can fail without bringing anything down. The servers are physically located in a physically secured hosting building that is built to provide the best internet connectivity, and the most friendly server enviroment. (Details on lunarpages.com). The building has backup resources for almost any disaster that can happen (power water etc etc).

So yes, they do manage their own enviroment, and their own hardware. This isn't a company that simply sells hosting on some servers they pay a dell technician to maintain during 9-5 hours. The only downtime I have seen is measured in minutes, and that was when they phyiscally moved offices, and a whole ton of computers!

Let me know if there is anything else I can clear up for you.

- Ed"

 

[Sean]

I tried to go to the mechanics page and it took quite awhile for it to load up. Also I noticed they are not doing their own DNS work. I would try and find out some users names that have sites of a similar load characteristic of ours and find out how they are doing with these people.

The forum itself doesn't hold much water as they could populate that themselves and/or make sure nothing of a negative nature stays on it.

What's your current bandwidth requirements per month?

Well, not sure they can steer 6,028 users and 35,000 posts in the direction they want. People would really complain if there was bias censoring I think. I'm not saying I am going with them, but they are one of the ones I'm looking at. Allowing for growth we'll probably need 30gig a month bandwidth within 12 months.

Do you know of any good hosts? One thing I find appealing about lunarpages is they are very open. They tell you what the network layout is, they tell you what servers they use, how many sites they host, have a discussion forum...

 

[Sean]

oh yeah, eric that guy's auto site had many banners which were trying to connect to various 3rd party sites in the background. I think they were slowing him down a bit...

 

[ian_greant]

The specs for lunar all sound good. On one of my old sites I used to push over 30GB a month with a pretty high transaction load and it was all handled by one good server admin and P500 running Unix and about a 1/4 GB ram (if memory serves correctly.. it's been a couple years) and my site wasn't the only one on the box..

It's really more about the server admin than the gear nowadays.

Ian

 

[Sean]

I'm pretty close to going with lunarpages. They also have a 30day money back guarantee and 99.9% uptime guarantee. Their techs also wear pagers 24/7 that go off should a server have and problems. Just the fact that if there is a problem you have someone to discuss it with 24/7 is a huge difference. From the responses I see in their forums they are almost fanatical about uptime.

 

[Sean]

this is where their datacenter is:

http://www.onewilshire.com/

"one of the most connected buildings in the world"

Their techs have an office in this building. I think we'll give these guys a shot.

 

[Sean]

Ok, we're going with them. I've purchased a years hosting package and can get a refund within 30 days if we don't like it. The account should be ready soon and I think we'll look to next weekend for the migration. They have a similar file structure to the current isp, so hopefully it won't be too painful. I'm doing the migration in a way that apug will always be up in the process -so as the dns updates to the new isp you'll notice the forum working again, if your dns is not updated you'll have the apug site with a locked forum. Looks like we'll have to get by on the chatroom for a few days next weekend!

 

[Flotsam]

Will we still be able to download JellyGirl MP3s here or will you be discontinuing that service? <g>