Forum Downtime (07/02/05)

[Grant]

Hi everyone,

Many apologies for the 5 hours! of downtime experienced tonight. As some of you may have noticed the forum has been running a little slower at times recently, at first I believed this to be due to another site that shares the server consuming all of the resources perhaps by being too busy for a shared enviroment. However, tonight the issue got worse and I sent compiled some evidence and sent it to my provider to get it sorted, no sooner had I done this when the server completely went down. It turns out that the primary hard-drive has been failing and this accounts for the performance getting worse and worse. Tonight it decided to kick the boat completely and it's been down for five hours whilst the data was retrieved and a new hard drive installed and setup.

Retrieving the data from the broken hard-drive ensures that no data is lost, I keep regular backs, on and offsite but I do these at most ever 24 hours, usually during the early hours so if I had to restore from a backup all posts from yesterday would've been lost, luckily this didn't happen and everything is back to normal.

I'm really pretty annoyed with my supplier now, these downtimes reflect badly on me, take alot of time to put right and are frankly just plain annoying for everyone! If the new hard-drive doesn't fix the speed issues then I will be migrating to a new host. Hopefully this won't have to happen but if it does, rest assured I will do everything in my power to ensure the forums continue to run smoothly and that the capacity is in place to maintain growth.

Many apologies again,

Grant

[OXO]

Thank you Grant for your efforts much appricated

Regards

James

[Grant]

Thanks guys

Looks like it could be a long night here, the reinstall has hosed up a few parts of Isee Stars that I want to get sorted!

Luckily, my other server that houses customers websites wasn't affected, As the forum is getting quite large now I'm tempted to register a name like "sglbackup.co.uk" or something so that when the forum does go down regulars have a place to go that is hosted on a seperate server so they can keep updated as to what is happening and maybe have a mini message board/chatroom so that they have something to do whilst the forum is down.

Cheers,

Grant

[OXO]

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StargazersLounge/

Just for now i have made a Yahoo Group.

James

[The Warthog]

Hey, we appreciate your hard work, you're doing the best you can, and nobody died. All in all, losing five hours of the forum isn't a tragedy. Keep up the good work!

[Astroman]

Thanks a ton for all your hard work and vigilance, Grant. Gotta love computers....or.....not....

[col]

yeah it was definitely strange not being able to get on the sight ,but cant be helped with computers being what they are, and i agree your doing a fantastic job.

[CELESCOPE]

Cheers Grant for all your hard work , yes did miss it last night , bad night all round clear sky went to clouds and no forum , BUT WE SURVIVED eheheheh , thanks again for all the hard work you and the other guys put in .

Rog

[lunator]

Grant

Thanks for the effort to get the site up and running.

Does your host provider have the ability to build a RAID configuration for the server?

Cheers

Ian

[Naz]

Not your fault Grant, thanks for all your hard work in keeping the forum going.

nabban

[Grant]

Thanks everyone for your kind words

Lunator, the downtime would have been similar even with Raid because the new hard-drive would have to be rebuild and the whole raid system would have to be checked before it could be put back in production. That is unless you have a very expensive raid system with hot swap hard drives etc... I know my host are considering it, but to be honest hardware failure happens, as long as their backups are sound and mine are too then I can tolerate hardware failure. The other issue with raid, it's not a fault tolerant solution, it has one huge point of failure, the raid controller, if that goes then unless you have an identical one laying around it's a massive pain to sort out.

I'm going to spend sometime today looking at having a mirror of the forum, synced daily to my second server under a different domain name so that in events such as last night, the capacity is there to use somewhere else as a temporary fix

Cheers,

Grant

[daz]

Steve and I were in abject panic, I can tell you!!

I had to 'talk' to the wife last night. That's going to take some recovering from!!!! :shock:

[Mick.G.]

First time in bed before 12.30 in ages.

Still good to know you can get things sorted Grant.

exellant work mate :thumbup:.

Mick

[MartinB]

Grant, the forum is an amazing piece of work. We all need a bit of down time sometimes - Daz can put in a bit of quality family time, I can catch up with my work. I have trouble keeping my PC going for 5 hours. These are factors outside your control.

:cheers: :cheers: :cheers: :cheers:

Martin

[russ]

No worries Grant....these things can't be helped and you're doing a fantastic job anyway.

Plus i got to see two episodes of CSI last night instead of being glued to the PC.

Russ

[Grant]

How good is CSI! I've also gotten a bit addicted to House, channel 5 isn't all bad

Thanks for your support everyone, hopefully things should be running smoother today

Thanks,

Grant

[daz]

House is fantastic!

I need to get my download hat on!!!

[russ]

I need to get the DVD recorder working tomorrow so i don't miss House. Rob and I are out observing.

CSI is totally addictive.

Channel 5 is just about tops at the moment.

Russ

[The Warthog]

CSI isn't bad, but Jorja Fox is addictive. I prefer CSI:NY, though, because I really like Gary Sinise as an actor. (Really, its not because of the lovely Greek goddess, really!)

[Greg]

I nearly started smoking again :shock:

I thought it was all a dream :shock:

Never mind it gave me a chance to clean my scope!!

No need to apologise Grant you do a superb job with the SGL....

Greg

[Jamie]

You da man Grant keep it up . PLEASE

[FLO]

Steve and I were in abject panic, I can tell you!!

I think I'm OK now

Thanks for watching over us Grant :sunny:

[radioactive]

well done once again Admin chaps

you guys must be really on the ball

I must say this site is impressing me it certainly carries the wow factor

Thanks a lot