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Weather in the Denver area interrupted power and connectivity to the server farm. They worked on the problem for quite a while then it took even longer to get all the servers rebooted. Looks like we are back online. :)
Hugs,
Erin
Comments
Oh goody!
Was getting a bit worried on this side o' the pond.!
no fear
I had no fear you would be back asap, you ladies work hard at it. keep up the good work
robert
Server farm....
...Holsteins and Jersey Servers have the best connections; Guernsey not so much!
Love, Andrea Lena
I do appreciate the reasons
I do appreciate the reasons for the downtime, as well as the efforts it takes to get things back up and running. My only negative comment would be that the CloudFlare service does not appear to do the job they are paid to do. The only 'cached' site it would show was from November 20th; obviously nothing recent. (and the last time I tried, it just gave me a 522 error)
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Caching
Cloudflare is not doing a better job of caching because, frankly, we don't let it. Completely cached sites present their own problems and when we tried it, no one liked the result. The principal things we pay Cloudflare 20 bucks a month for is taking a lot of load off the server for anonymous hits on the front page and for acting as a firewall in front of our firewall. This has extended the life of our servers by six months to a year or more.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
I'll take your word for it,
I'll take your word for it, as you're the ones actually in the hardware; I am just having a hard time figuring out how it extends the lifespan of the server (reduce the load, sure).
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Exactly
Most anonymous visitors are NOT thrashing our hard drives when they visit the front page. Believe me, when you have half a million anonymous visitors a month, it does add wear to the drives. A desktop machine could reasonably expect consumer-grade hard drives to last five years or more. We use server-grade hard drives and can use them up in a year or so with the amount of traffic we get.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Ah. I already use caching on
Ah. I already use caching on my systems, so even with all the web comics I host, I don't see that much actual hard drive stress - as long as I make sure to keep the memory up. When I had Penny and Aggie on there, they put some heavy stress on the drive (if I could have bumped the ram to 64 gigs, that would have fixed that problem, though)
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
We've got 32 gig
If we could put 64 gig in the server, we would. :) It won't hold that much. Next servers we get will hold 96 gig, we've priced them out. If something that holds more gig is available and not too dear, we'll go for it. :)
We also do internal caching, in fact, there are three levels of caching on BC. Database caches, apache caches and cloud flare caches. Such redundancy takes some careful tuning, each of the types of caching is tuned to only do what it does best. We've tried other caching schemes and this seems to work best. Cloudflare made the difference between staying up for weeks at a time and having database crashes four or five times a day.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
If you are really looking for
If you are really looking for a way to vist the site while it is down you can go to:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://bigclosetr.us/
Yes looks like the last time they captured the site was back in September but it is better then nothing.
No Problem
After all the server problem with changing servers and the hacker I just sat back and waited I knew that BCTS would be back on tine as soon as possible THANKS for the update
The Weather In Arkansas Is Turning To S---!
Temperature in the NW is in the low 20's, and it is dropping fast to the south. The ice storm is on its way.
Portia
Miraculously...
... As about 32,000 people in the river valley alone are without power, we're still good for now. But I was kind of shocked to see this.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-t2itIezY2Pc/UqHNeDC4y2I/A...
The beloved bush that lent a title image to my short story, Virginia. It might bounce back though. :-)
-
Glad to hear things are sorted on the tech end. There's another winter storm (Dion) that's going to blow through, but hopefully the databases survive unscathed. :-)
Become a Patron for early access ♥
The Weather
We have temperatures in the mid 20's and about an inch of sleet on everything about twenty miles south of Dallas with more comming and heading your way. DUCK!
DJ
Glad BC is back up. But I
Glad BC is back up.
But I note that Crystal Hall is still down. Hardware problem?
Brooke brooke at shadowgard dot com
http://brooke.shadowgard.com/
Girls will be boys, and boys will be girls
It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world
"Lola", the Kinks
Apparently
Looks like apache crashed when the server was brought back up. I did a reset and Crystal Hall loads now. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
There's still something
There's still something wrong. Pages take forever to load, and sometimes what loads is a blank page.
So there's some sort of issue there still.
Brooke brooke at shadowgard dot com
http://brooke.shadowgard.com/
Girls will be boys, and boys will be girls
It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world
"Lola", the Kinks
Clear your browser cache
Those symptoms seem to be on your end. It is very quick here.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Main CrystalHall up but forums seem to be down
Even if i fully reboot, the forums link on the crystalhall main page still fails to load. I assume the 2 are on different servers or at least separated on the same box. currently forums are timing out to blank page after spinning for a while.
Thanks for your hurculean efforts in making sure everything stays up and running.
Joelle.
ps - any word on status of the 7-8 month old issue of Warren/Diane not having sufficient permissions to update the main crystalhall page. Last update was April, prior to it moving to current server. I apologize if this was already fixed but havent heard anything in a while.
The old issue
The permissions stuff was fixed a couple of months ago (maybe a little longer) within a couple of days of the problem being reported to us. If there are any further issues or something else is not working then no one has contacted Piper or Erin about it.
Hugs
Cat
-
You can't choose your relatives but you can choose your family.
Ok, the main screen loads
Ok, the main screen loads fine. It's the *forums* that aren't loading right.
For example...
http://www.crystalhall.org/chboards3/
Brooke brooke at shadowgard dot com
http://brooke.shadowgard.com/
Girls will be boys, and boys will be girls
It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world
"Lola", the Kinks
weather
Yah the weather here is cold and snow .. just so you know that Sw Missouri is not that far fromDenver or Arkansa..
Dawn
My therapist once asked me when was I going to stop killing myself for everyone around me and start living for myself. I think it was what set me on the path to who I finally have become.....Me.
When I was little...
My parents and I were leaving my grandparents in southeast Missouri to go back to California and an ice storm hit the night before. On a steel bridge in Arkansas, we got almost to the top of the arch when the car, a big old Mercury, turned sideways and slid back to the bottom. "Do it again, Daddy!" I said. We turned around and stayed two more weeks with the grandparents. :)
Be careful out there. We had an ice storm on the mountain here last night and one predicted for tonight, too, so more of this weather is heading east.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Weather
I just hope Penny Lane doesn't live on the East coast of England because they are having abnormally high tides driven by excessively high winds. Erosion has already washed numerous houses out to sea.
Get your fur lined drawers out for it's going to be a long cold winter!
DJ
High tides
The highest reached 19 feet (6 meters) above normal. This was due to a combination of very low pressure, spring tides and the shape of the North Sea, which basically funnels down to the Straits of Dover. Some places got flooded, some houses, built on sand dunes by the beach, were washed away.
Fortunately we took the decision, when we moved here, to find somewhere (i) away from the coast and (ii) halfway up a hill. No flooding for us, thank you.
Penny
Just to prove
that Florida is its own little universe, while everyone else is freezing, we're having near record high temperatures here. Unbelievable!
Hugs
Grover
We're back to what used to be
We're back to what used to be 'normal' in the late 80's and early 90's. Cold and wet.
Three seasons in Houston. Hot and dry, Hot and wet, and Cold and wet.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Of course the 'dry' is only
Of course the 'dry' is only talking about precipitation, when it comes to the humidity that's year round, except for maybe a few days here and there. (and as someone who works outside all day I revel in those humidity free days.)
*Oh, and when it's the peak of the hot season you do not want the wind to blow. It will feel like it came straight out of an oven and sear the flesh from your bones, at least that's what I tell my boss will happen. Still doesn't get me out of work unfortunately.
Bibliophage's Weather
Hot and dry, Hot and Wet, Cold and wet...
Do I detect a pattern here of hot and wet?
Don't let someone else talk you out of your dreams. How can we have dreams come true, if we have no dreams?
Katrina Gayle "Stormy" Storm
Houston
Company I used to work for was headquartered in Houston. I can confirm all that except the dry part. All of us hated it when we had to fly into Houston to talk to the bosses. HUMIDTY!! Place never dried out that I ever saw!
"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin
By 'dry', I'm referring to
By 'dry', I'm referring to the periods where it's day after day of no rain. That usually gets ended by 'Hot and wet' which is also called 'hurricane season'.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Ah, I see I responded too
Ah, I see I responded too fast when I should have just kept on reading. Well, I added something else to my post up above so it doesn't seem like I'm a idiot repeating what other people have already said. :P
8" of snow
I have 8" in my yard, and I won't get out and clean it off the sidewalks and driveway. It is too cold, and I am too old to be doing work in this type of weather anyway. Better to stay inside and be warm and toasty. Current temp outside is about 15 and it will get colder during the night.
I live in Northwest Arkansas and from what I have read so far, it looks like us Ozarkians (and Little Rockians also) are doing well, all things considered. I hope it stays that way for us, and for all the BC group.
Never Give up! Never, ever, give up!
Don't let someone else talk you out of your dreams. How can we have dreams come true, if we have no dreams?
Katrina Gayle "Stormy" Storm
8" of snow
Ain't global warming just glorious?
DJ
Remember, it's not global
Remember, it's not global warming anymore.
It's "climate change"
Weasel words if I ever heard them, considering that historically, climate change is the _norm_
(Otherwise, we wouldn't have had the 'Medieval Warming Period' and the 'Little Ice Age'. Then there's "The Year There Was No Summer" due to Krakatoa)
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.