Army.ca Status- The History of Outages & Dark Days

[Mike Bobbitt]

Thanks Bruce, I appreciate it. The hardware is in BC, so once it goes "off the air" it‘s impossible for me to work with from here. I have to request assistance via e-mail from a guy doing me favours, so it can be slow at times. Troubleshooting some problems over the phone could be interesting too.

Hopefully it‘s nothing too serious, we‘ll see today hopefully...

Anyway, thanks for the offer!


Cheers

 

[Mike Bobbitt]

Good news! We‘re *finally* up and running on the new hardware!

I apologize again for the down time and the loss of data that occurred as part of this transition. The last couple weeks have been a challenge, and I‘ll be glad to have my weekends back!

Thanks to everyone who showed their support over the last month. It‘s been a long road, but we‘re back on the air and more stable than ever. I couldn‘t have done it without your support!

Cheers and thanks


Mike Bobbitt


P.S. The new hardware is a bit faster, so you may notice a bit of a speed-up.

 

[Bruce Monkhouse]

Just hoping this post will work as I seem to be all by myself here......

 

[Mike Bobbitt]

Well, we were out of commission all weekend, but we‘re back now.

Just my luck that we move onto the new hardware, and the network goes down for 3 days.

Anyway, we‘re back on the air and I‘m working to keep it that way.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but at least this time there was no data loss.


Cheers
Mike

 

[Bruce Monkhouse]

It must be because I logged back on. I just got to work and logged on and WHAM....

 

[pte anthony]

It worked

 

[winchable]

*twitching*
....b..b-b-b..back?
..w-w-w..we-re back n-n-now????

*gets off of floor*

I was fine really.

 

[Mike Bobbitt]

If you think *you* had a long weekend... I spent way too long trying to decide whether to cut over to the backup system (and lose some data) or just ride it out.

I rode it out and it took a little longer than I‘d hoped, but we lost nothing (except 1 year from my life expectancy...)

 

[Mike Bobbitt]

...and we‘re back again! This time it was a new problem - the system ran out of memory. I‘m going to try to track down what happened so I can make sure it doesn‘t happen again!

Anwyay, sorry for the inconvenience - again... We‘ll get this all worked out sooner or later.


Cheers
Mike

 

[Mike Bobbitt]

Just a quick note to say that we‘re back on the temporary hardware on the bandwidth limited connection. I moved us back because we were having some serious stability issues, and I didn‘t want us to be out over the weekend.

Due to the limits on this connection though, I‘ll have to move us back again after a few days, which may mean some more interruptions, unfortunately.

The good news is I purchased some new hardware for the "permanent" connection today, and hope to have it tested and in place in about a week. That should resolve the majority of the issues we‘ve been seing.


Thanks again for your patience, and please bear with me while we continue to work out the kinks.

 

[Mike Bobbitt]

Ok, back again after a 20 hour outage. We went out at about midnight last night and came back at about 2000 ET tonight.

It‘s a good news bad news thing: the bad news is that our router seems to be consistently failing. The good news is that a new router has already been purchased, configured and shipped, so it should be in place within a week.


Thanks again for your patience, all!

 

[Mike Bobbitt]

Well, through the sleuthing of some members here, it turns out we were actually *blown* off the air with intent.

Seems we were mistaken for the official site, and took a lambasting for everything from the site intro to the layout to the posts, and these guys took it upon themselves to overwhelm the site and take it down.

They must be truly proud that they managed to take a server, that was already limping along, off the air.

 

[Korus]

They must be truly proud that they managed to take a server, that was already limping along, off the air.

I wouldn‘t joke about that.. They probably ARE really proud..

 

[Tyrnagog]

They are, in fact. It is a running practice for them to see how many hits a site will take before it goes down...

I think the following quote will help illustrate the point..

"WOA, link is farked!!! FARK HAS DEFEATED THE CANADIAN ARMY! bwahahah"

 

[webster]

This might sound like a stupid question...i dont know alot about computers and stuff but is there anything we can do to help keep the forums running smothly?

 

[Tyrnagog]

I think when Mike gets the new equipment installed, it will help. but, this is costing him real $$, so I am happy it is up most of the time..

 

[webster]

I agree. Mike I hope your not losing to much money from this site...lol

 

[Mike Bobbitt]

Thanks guys... I have to admit it‘s taken a bit more of my time and money than I‘d anticipated lately, but I live in the hope that these stability problems are "just about to end."

In terms of help, you‘re already doing it... Being pateint while I work out the kinks helps, as does the odd bit of encouragement.


Cheers

 

[Mike Bobbitt]

Just to give a status update: testing *seems* to indicate that our router is failing intermittently. What that means is we‘ll probably be off the air sporadically until it‘s replaced. Luckily, that should be some time this coming week.

However, there‘s no conclusive proof that it‘s the router, so there‘s a chance the problem may continue to exist for a little longer yet.

Thanks again for bearing with me through this. I know it‘s annoying to have the site go off the air without warning, and it seems to be occurring more frequently now.

I‘ll post here when the new router is in place.


Cheers
Mike

 

[winchable]

*sobbing*
Why? WHYY? GOD WHY?

Actually it‘s good luck for me, all weekend it was down I had to write a research paper and not having this wonderful distraction made it much better.

For a part-time internet Guru, a weekend down is hardly anything to be sorry about!

Cheers!