The “farnsworth” server was restarted at 11:45 PM Pacific time tonight, causing a brief 2 minute interruption in Web and e-mail service for customers on that server. Incoming mail was queued and delivered after the interruption.
We’ve added a new feature to hosting accounts: Live, realtime access to the Apache Web server “error log”, both in the “My Account” control panel and as raw files you can access through FTP/ssh/etc.
To view the most recent 200 lines of the error log, login to the control panel (having trouble?), click “Statistics and Logs”, and look at the new “Web site error logs” section.
To download the full raw error log files, see this page.
We hope you find this useful!
Recently, several customers have told us that pages on their Web sites have been modified without their knowledge. Upon investigation, the customers found their computers had been infected with a virus that steals saved FTP passwords, such as the “Gumblar” or Trojan.PWS.Tupai.A virus.
We’ve taken a step to protect you against this problem (described below), but it’s wise to protect yourself, too.
We posted earlier about a problem affecting the elzar Web server. While we were investigating the cause of that, the same thing happened on another Web server, “calculon”, causing a separate outage for customers on that server from 2:34 PM to 2:43 PM Pacific time this afternoon.
During this period, Web sites on that server were unavailable and incoming e-mail was delayed. (The Web server was slow for about six minutes after it was restarted, too.)
On both servers, high disk and memory usage caused the load to skyrocket to the point where they effectively stopped responding.
The good news is that we have narrowed down the cause, so it shouldn’t happen again. A bug in one of our maintenance programs that runs on each server was almost certainly responsible. The bug has been fixed.
We sincerely apologize for this issue, and regret the inconvenience it caused for customers hosted on these servers. Other servers were not affected.
The “elzar” Web server experienced high load between 5.40 and 6.00 AM Pacific time this morning, April 15. This resulted in slow Web sites and some interruption of service. (Some e-mail activity was delayed, but no e-mail was lost.)
We sincerely apologize for this problem. We consider this type of failure to be unacceptable, and are looking into the cause of the problem so that we can take the appropriate steps to prevent it from happening again.
As we’ve already posted, some of our Web servers will be restarted tonight at 11 PM Pacific time.
We’re adding the “zapp” Web server to that list so we can replace a RAID array disk that caused a problem on that server earlier today.
Update: The maintenance was completed with less than five minutes of “downtime”.
The “zapp” Web server was unavailable between 3:43 and 3.53 AM Pacific time this morning, April 4. This resulted in an interruption of service for Web sites on that server. (Some e-mail activity was delayed, but no e-mail was lost.)
We sincerely apologize for this problem. We consider this type of failure to be unacceptable, and are looking into the cause of the problem so that we can take the appropriate steps to prevent it from happening again.
At approximately 11:00 PM Pacific time on Friday, April 3, the “flexo”, “mom” and “elzar” servers will be restarted. As a result, Web site and e-mail service for some customers will be unavailable for approximately five minutes.
No e-mail will be lost, of course; incoming mail will just be slightly delayed.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. This maintenance is necessary to install an updated “kernel” on our servers, as described in an earlier post.
Update: We’re also going to include the “zapp” server in this maintenance to replace a disk in the RAID array.
Update 2: The maintenance was completed with less than five minutes of “downtime”.
