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

[Mike Bobbitt]

More good news!

The connection was put in today (over a week early), and is now set up. This means the last piece of the puzzle is now in place! We're now on new hardware and a new Internet connection.

I'm *very* pleased. In the last month, we've gone from running in an environment that was hard to support on flaky hardware to new, stable hardware and a local, supportable connection. This is great news, and should mean an end to Army.ca's week long outages and data loss. (Yeah, I know... I'm begging for it...)

Among other things, this means that we'll no longer have some mail automatically dropped as spam (some people could not get their initial registration e-mails because the temporary connection was in a range of addresses marked as potential spammers).

Thanks to all of you for your support (both financially and morally) and your patience in getting this far!


Cheers
Mike

 

[Infanteer]

My life is now complete....

 

[Bruce Monkhouse]

...it can't be complete, you have'nt bought me a beer yet.... 8)

 

[Mike Bobbitt]

I'll be honest, there were times over the last 6 months that I wasn't sure Army.ca was going to survive, given the troubles we were having. But one by one, we've knocked down the barriers, and now we're immeasurably better off than we were before.

What a relief!

 

[Mike Bobbitt]

As you may know, we had an outage from Sunday night until about noon today.

The outage was caused by a local thunderstorm, which caused a power bump in my area. Unfortunately, I'm currently on the road, so I was unable to attend to the system in a timely manner. (I did manage to convince my wife to perform basic troubleshooting and bring it back online today.)

So despite the new hardware and software upgrades, power loss is still a real threat to the site. Looks like it's time to invest in a UPS once I scrape up the cash.

Anyway, we're back on the air, thanks for your patience.


Cheers
Mike

 

[muskrat89]

Thank Mrs. Bobbitt for us..  She's the bomb!

 

[bossi]

Funny - I suspected as much ...
("for want of a nail, the kingdom was lost")

Guess we know what you need for Father's Day, eh?

 

[Mike Bobbitt]

Ok, we're now running on a UPS, so the next power outage will have to be more than about 25 minutes to knock us out. Next up: I'm going to try to configure it so that when the UPS is low on power, the server will shut down automatically.

 

[Mike Bobbitt]

Folks,

If all goes well I'll be upgrading the server tonight at around 2000 ET. The upgrade shouldn't take more than an hour to complete. There should be no noticeable changes here, as it's an underlying system upgrade.


Cheers
Mike

 

[armyrules]

Thanx mike when it has to get done u get it done good on ya

 

[Mike Bobbitt]

The upgrade was a no-go, looks like a minor hardware problem. Will try again possibly this weekend. There's no rush, and you won't see any problems from the failed upgrade. (It was cleanly backed out.)


Cheers
Mike

 

[Mike Bobbitt]

I decided to do the upgrade this morning, so now it's done. Please let me know if you notice anything that appears to be broken as a result.


Thanks
Mike

 

[Mike Bobbitt]

All,

Please accept my apologies for the outage that ran from roughly 1100 ET yesterday, until about 1500 ET today. The issue, in essence, was that our ISP did not pay some outstanding charges to Bell, and were cut off. Unfortunately, they gave no notice to their customers, and we were left scrambling.

We are now back online, and I don't anticipate any further problems.


Thanks for your patience,


Mike Bobbitt
Army.ca Owner

 

[Scratch_043]

Thanks Mike, I was freaking out that I couldn't get my daily Army.ca Fix. :threat:

 

[HollywoodHitman]

Jeeze Mike, I thought it was my new Axe body spray....... :'(

 

[Lexi]

*Twitch* Never scare me like that again! 

 

[Pte. Bloggins]

Yeah without this site working, I was actually stuck doing homework!  :crybaby:

 

[Burrows]

I was seriously going through withdrawl....it was creepy...

 

[m_a_c]

Thanks for giving me back my daily Army.ca needs.  I was kinda worried there for a bit.  ;D

 

[armygirlfriend]

After trying no less than 4 computers, in 3 different houses, I am thoroughly relieved to get my daily intake of army.ca