Monthly Archives: April 2009

Unscheduled websrv01 Downtime

We are currently experiencing an unscheduled service outage on websrv01 due to what we believe may be a hardware issue on the server. Unfortunately our co-location provider misconfigured the power port that our server is plugged into, so we were unable to reboot the machine ourselves. Currently we have a technician assigned in Montreal who is on his way to the data centre to reboot the server and investigate further. We will update this post as more information becomes available.

Update 3:53PM
We are still working with our co-location provider to determine the exact cause of the problem. One theory currently being investigated is that we may be experiencing a distributed denial of service attack on the server. As soon as we have any further information, we will post it.

Update 6:20PM
The problem has now been resolved, and all service has been fully restored. It does in fact appear to have been a distributed denial of service attack, which fortunately ceased on it’s own. We sustained 1Mbit of http traffic to websrv01 for only a short period of time before the server was unable to handle the requests. The 1Mbit wall continued until just after 6PM when it stopped just as mysteriously as it began. Further investigation is on-going and any new information will be made available.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Nellie Belly

Karla and I have been talking about getting a new puppy for quite a while, and when we stumbled upon a photograph of a litter of Lhasa Apso puppies for sale on Kijiji, our minds were pretty much made up… we wanted the one with the white boots!

We drove 3.5 hours to meet the breeder (Heidi) and the puppies on a Friday evening, and everything went really well, so we picked up our new little friend the following day and headed for home.

On our journey home I happened to round the corner of an off-ramp a bit too quickly, which caused our new puppy friend to take a rather large tumble in her kennel. Karla’s first reaction to this first boo-boo was “Woah Nelly”, and from there we named her Nellie.

She has been integrating into our lives and routine with surprising ease. We already have a 10 year old Lhasa Apso (Dyna), who has been a huge help so far with the training process, much to her dismay. We were a bit worried about how Dyna would react to a new puppy, and at this point my guess is she’s neither here-nor-there. Some days she is very excited about having a friend to play with so they tug on ropes for hours at a time, and other days Dyna will have none-of-it while Nellie bites her ears and generally harasses her. It is funny to watch, and I am sure they will grow to be great friends over time.

So that’s our exciting news. Puppies are cute, this one especially… and I look forward to posting the dozens of comedic photos we have taken so far. There is also this really funny video I took of Nellie learning how to go up and down stairs, I will throw that on YouTube over the weekend.