At approximately 3:05PM EDT today (Wednesday, March 21st, 2007) websrv01 encountered unexpected server downtime that lasted approximately 20 – 25 minutes. The cause of the downtime is currently unknown, a hard reboot of the server was required in order to restore service to the server.
We will post more information as to the cause after we determine what happened. We apologize for the inconvenience.
A haiku dedicated to my favourite PHP function, strtotime():
oh strtotime() bliss
a function creating ease
such simplicity
This is a notice to inform you that there are scheduled server maintenance updates planned for both websrv01 and websrv02 which will take place tonight, Thursday, March 8th at 10:00PM EST.
These updates will encompass all available Redhat Linux Updates, as well as prepare the server for Sunday’s new Daylight Savings Time changes. At the same time, we will be upgrading PHP on both servers: websrv01 will be upgraded to PHP 4.4.6 and websrv02 will be upgraded to PHP 5.2.1.
Downtime for this update should be minimal, around 3 – 5 minutes for the servers to be rebooted.
A quick notice to let everyone know that tonight (Thursday, February 8th, 2007) between 10:00PM EST and 11:00PM EST there was network problems at our data centre, which affected both websrv01 and websrv02 as well as the entire iWeb network. The problem was intermittent, but prominent and did impact all services on our servers during this time.
All network activity is now considered back to normal operation. If you experience any other problems, please let me know.
Just thought I’d blog about Karla’s spill last week. She was running down the stairs to catch me before I left to work (to tell me that Castro was not dead) and missed a stair and fell right on her tail bone.
She’s been laid up on the couch now for 3 days and a bit… huge bruise. Sorry guys… no pics 😀
You can catch Karla’s side of the story here if you’d like.
This Christmas, for the first time in our lives, my wife and I travelled over the chilly North Atlantic to see for ourselves what the “Old World” really felt like. The first purpose of our journey I suppose, was to visit my adventurous younger sister, who about five months ago moved from Canada to Peterborough, England for a job opportunity. Having my sister in Peterborough was fantastic, because it allowed us not only to see where and how she lives, but also because it ended up saving us quite a bit of money, which in turn allowed us to stay for nearly three weeks. The second purpose of our trip was business; I intended on meeting a few colleagues, with whom I do ListMessenger-related business with, as well as a web-hosting client of mine.
Continue Reading…
Important message for e-mail users on both websrv01 and websrv02
who use the POP3 mail protocol and any e-mail client (such as Outlook,
Thunderbird, Eudora, etc) which send e-mail through either of our servers.
Today we have removed the ability on both mail servers to allow
“pop3-before-smtp” authentication for sending e-mail. Previously, if you
had your e-mail client setup to check your e-mail using the POP3 protocol,
you were then able to send e-mail messages for a period of 20 minutes
before needing to check your e-mail again.
This was causing problems with e-mail users that have virus infected
Windows machines, which were then free to send their spam through our
server for a period of 20 minutes (until the POP Lock was re-enabled).
If you previous did not have your e-mail client setup to use SMTP
Authentication, then you will need to reconfigure your client to enable
SMTP Authentication before attempting to send mail through the server.
I can somewhat giggle about it now, but half an hour ago I was some upset. On the way into my house this afternoon, I tripped on the step and knocked my 12″ Powerbook G4 a bit on the step above. It was in my nice thick neoprene laptop bag and the bump wasn’t that hard, so I didn’t thing much of it. Tonight I went to work on a few things and found that my beautiful aluminum Apple case had a large bend in it, and there was also a few small ripples. 🙁
After freaking out for a second I shut off the machine and found that the top left corner of the laptop (about 1/3 of the machine) was in fact bent out about 1 cm. Yeah, so my computer now had a good curve to it, which made the battery not sit flush in the bottom.
I ended up carefully bending it back into position with careful pressure on the wound, and it’s now straighter than ever (it never did seem to sit flat before).
I was initially peeved about the aluminum actually bending, but I suppose with the -20 degrees Celsius weather today that a plastic PC laptop would have been destroyed. Gotta love Apple.
Well if you stumbled across this post because you were looking for the Simpsons TV show episode where Bart finds Mr. Burns’ $1000 bill, then they decide to go to England on vacation (which by the way is called The Regina Monologues) this isn’t it… sorry about your luck.
Karla and I are heading to the UK, and we are pretty dang excited about it. Neither of us has ever been to Europe before and we’re going for nearly three weeks and plan to see everything we possibly can see during our stay.
My sister moved to England about 3 months ago for a job opportunity, and since this is technically her first holiday season away from the family and on her own, I thought it would be a nice time to jump over the pond and pay her a visit. While we are there I plan to visit a few clients and colleagues as well, which I’ve previously never met in person before so that will be a nice adventure.
I plan to take copious amounts of pictures on my Canon Rebel XT while I’m there as well (Sidenote: On a new 4GB compact flash card that I just bought for $102.00CAD from TigerDirect… can you believe it? 4GB’s for $100! That’s sick… I paid more then that for my 64MB SD not too long ago) so prepare for a new vacations section in my photo album 🙂
If you know of any “must see” places… please feel free to suggest them. We have no solid plans at this point, but are just planning to travel as much as possible and take in everything we can.
If your inbox is at all like mine, you have all-of-a-sudden started to receive a heck of a lot more spam than you are used to in the past month or so. Have no fear, you are not alone. The Internet has recently experienced a large influx of spam e-mail thanks to Russian hackers who control a network of hacked PC’s some 70,000 computers strong.
I don’t normally post these messages; however, this affects so many people I want to make sure you are all aware of it. Please read the following article by eWeek for more information: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2060235,00.asp
A final note: Windows users… does your computer have the “SpamThru” trojan?