02-04-2003, 06:45 AM
A few of you have come to me asking why the sites been down several times for hours at a time overnight. Last month was the best month we ever had, in every aspect, posts, visits, hits, etc. So I chalked it up to us just putting too much pressure on the server but I wrote to the host company and they explained it was their fault, here's the e-mail they sent me.
Just wanted to let everyone know.
Just wanted to let everyone know.
Quote:Dear Client,
After conducting intensive investigation, we're now able to provide you with
this update.
We have experienced 4 network outages during the
past 3 months. Below you will find a duration and the cause of each outage, as well as what we're doing to prevent them from happening again.
December 28th, 2002 (~3:30am - 4:30am EST) - This was due to maintenance
meant to upgrade our core router's (device responsible for directing traffic
between Internet and our servers) supervisor engine to increase its throughput
and performance. Unfortunately, this upgrade failed due to unexpected issues
with IOS (router's operating system).
January 5th, 2003 (~2:37am - 3:06am EST) - This was due to the second
attempt to upgrade the core router to increase its capacity and performance,
this time the upgrade was successful.
January 31st, 2003 (~2am - 5am EST) - This was due to scheduled
maintenance of a fiber ring connecting our core router to ATM network which
unexpectedly caused the router to flap (connect/disconnect) many times which
in turn caused the router to stop responding, thus causing downtime. We did
not expect anything close to the downtime we experienced and therefore did
not notify you in advance.
February 1st, 2003 (~4am - 6am EST) - This was due to unscheduled
maintenance by the fiber vendor related to the above maintenance which
caused our core router to flap and become unresponsive for the second time.
We're not expecting any additional maintenance in the next few weeks, so things should return back to normal, as they have been in the past. Furthermore, if fiber maintenance is to take place, yet again, we are now connected through a different core router which was not affected by the
flappage caused by the fiber vendor.
Unfortunately, all this maintenance has caught us by surprise and therefore caused us so much downtime. If you have been with us for a long time, you know that we have never been down so much, excluding for the period of 9/11 when power was cut off to our data center due to the attacks on the twin
towers in NYC, USA. After the power was restored and backup power generators fixed, we have not experienced downtime since.