Brief scheduled maintenance (May 30)
The “farnsworth” Web server locked up and needed restarting again last night at about 9:04 PM Pacific time, causing another short outage for some customers. (A similar problem happened Monday night.) To make sure this doesn’t happen again, we’ll be replacing the entire server (switching it with a spare server) at about 11 PM (Pacific) tonight, which will result in about 5 minutes of downtime.
We’re also taking this opportunity to upgrade the hardware on one of our mail servers to allow for future growth; customers (even those with accounts on other Web servers besides the farnsworth server) may see a short (approximately 5 minute) interruption in their ability to retrieve e-mail between 11 PM and midnight.
We apologize for any inconvenience this causes — as always, we’re committed to the highest possible levels of reliability.
on Wednesday, May 30, 2007 at 6:04 pm (Pacific) Jeff wrote:
Robert, does the mail server hardware upgrade interrupt the ability of the account to receive mail, or does it just interrupt the ability to check mail received by the account? (I’m on “mom” server, by the way).
on Wednesday, May 30, 2007 at 8:42 pm (Pacific) Robert Mathews (Chief Tiger) wrote:
Jeff, good question. Any newly arriving mail gets queued up on one of our other mail servers while the maintenance is happening, and that mail gets delivered as soon as the server is available again. So any mail that arrives for you will be properly delivered no matter what happens — nothing will ever be lost. The delay is just in your ability to read the new mail. Of course, we know that even that kind of delay is annoying, so we make sure to keep this kind of interruption as short as possible.