At approximately 11:00 PM Pacific time this Saturday night (September 20), all Tiger Technologies servers will be restarted. As a result, customer Web sites and e-mail service will be unavailable for three to five minutes.
No e-mail will be lost, of course; incoming mail will just be delayed for a few minutes.
This brief maintenance is necessary to upgrade the operating system “Linux kernel” to a newer version for security reasons. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes.
Update: the maintenance was completed with less than three minutes “downtime” per server.
If you have a Ruby on Rails application that originally used Rails 1.1.6 or earlier, you might have trouble after yesterday’s Rails update (which also updated several other Ruby “gems”, including the “RubyGems” gem itself).
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We’ve updated the default version of Ruby on Rails on our servers to version 2.1.1.
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The “calculon” Web server needed to be restarted at 12:40 AM Pacific time this morning due to extremely high load.
However, the server did not restart immediately, because it performed a time-consuming disk file system check (“fsck”) after the restart, causing an interruption in Web service and a delay in mail delivery for customers on that server (other servers were not affected).
The server finished its fsck check at 3:45 AM and is now working normally.
This is by far the longest outage we’ve experienced on a server in several years. I want to personally apologize to every affected customer: we don’t consider this kind of problem acceptable at all, and we deeply regret the downtime. We’ll be carefully reviewing this incident to see what we can learn from it in the future.
Our business offices will be closed on Monday, September 1 to observe the US legal holiday. As always, we’ll provide same-day support for time-sensitive issues via our ticket and e-mail systems. However, questions that aren’t time-sensitive (including most billing matters) may not be answered until the next day, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
Between 5:11 and 5:46 PM Pacific time today, some people who reach our servers via an “Internet backbone” called Global Crossing (including some Comcast cable customers) were unable to connect to our data center. Other users weren’t affected.
Global Crossing has apparently corrected the problem, and everything is now operating normally. We’ll continue to monitor this issue closely.
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Due to software updates on our servers, most Web hosting customers will experience about ten minutes of scheduled maintenance downtime between 11 PM and 1 AM Pacific time starting on one of the following nights, depending on which server your site is on:
- Friday, August 22 (servers beginning with letter “l-z”)
- Saturday, August 23 (servers beginning with letter “a-k”)
(The servers named “bender” and “lrrr” have already been upgraded, and those customers are not affected.)
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We’ve updated the default version of Ruby on Rails on our servers to version 2.1.0.
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Recently, the Web hosting industry has been abuzz with talk of companies trying to outsource their mail service. One of our largest competitors recently announced that because half of their customer requests for help were about e-mail, and because e-mail is difficult to get right, their customers should just use GMail instead.
The problem is that GMail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail and other free mail services have no real support. If you have trouble, there’s no way to talk to the people running the mail system and ask them about individual messages.
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The “calculon” Web server needed to be restarted at 1:36 Pacific time today, resulting in a five-minute interruption of service for Web sites and e-mail on that server.
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