Critter.Net

email

2008-08-04T08:17:52Z

I failed to backup my bookmarks when I wiped my hard drive about two weeks ago... what's the link for logging into critter.net email? I don't see it anywhere on the main site.

EDIT- found it in my cell phone's browser bookmarks... uh, both IE and FF are freaking out over it's security certificate.

Critter.Net upgrade - complete

2008-07-27T17:09:20Z

If you encounter any problems on the server, let me know.

Critter.net unavailable from now - upgrade begins

2008-07-27T16:04:19Z

Critter.net OS upgrade

2008-07-24T15:46:41Z

Now scheduled for this upcoming Sunday - July 27th - starting at 9am Pacific time. Estimating it should be back online around 12noon Pacific time.

Upgrade - postponed

2008-07-13T19:39:39Z

Critter.net upgrade did not happen this morning due to other external factors.
It has been postponed to a time yet to be announced.

Critter.Net downtime/upgrade - re-scheduled to Sunday

2008-07-11T17:07:27Z

Further to my earlier post, this has been moved from Saturday to the same time Sunday. (9am Pacific, 12noon Eastern)

Just realized that I have other commitments Saturday morning that precludes (isn't that a fun word?) me from doing the upgrade.

scheduled downtime for OS upgrade

2008-07-07T16:41:33Z

Critter.net and all it's services will be down from around 9am Pacific time (noon Eastern, 5pm UK) on Saturday July 12 for operating system updates.

It's become apparent that this update is now required due to other dependencies on the system.

I'm budgeting a 3 hour window for the update, but if all is well things should be restored before that.

Status

2008-04-16T22:04:35Z

Just brought Critter.net back up online. It needed a power cycle as it wasn't responding to the console or anything useful.

Looks like it hung up on something around 1pm EDT/10am PDT.

Sorry about the delay - I was giving people training in Lowell, MA today and didn't find out about this until I already left the building - where I got on the road for Rhode Island. RIght now, I'm at a McDonald's (just outside Pawtucket) using their WiFi to bring things back up.

SSL Certificates

2008-04-10T16:57:51Z

Some of them (mail, web) expired yesterday, so you may have gotten warnings about that.

I've just installed new certificates for everything that uses them, so we're good for another year. Hurrah!

All done

2008-03-26T20:13:34Z

Disks are sync'd and final reboot has been performed.

We're good to go...

Reminder: Critter.net going down for maintenance in 1 hr

2008-03-26T14:58:55Z

That'd be 9am PDT (11am CDT, noon EDT)

This is for replacement of the failing hard drive.

More scheduled downtime

2008-03-26T00:57:02Z

Tomorrow (Wednesday March 26th) at 11am CDT.
Getting the bad hard drive swapped out.

Critter.net back up

2008-03-25T19:35:49Z

There'll still be more outages to come, but I hope this was the worst of them.

Plans now:
- ~~reboot to get the mirrored system working (synchronizing now)~~
- outage to replace the failing disk
- synchronize from the second disk to the replacement primary
- reboot again to use the primary

Server still down... er, or is it?

2008-03-25T19:23:29Z

A configuration error managed to lock me out from the serial console, and rebooting doesn't work because of the failing disk.

This is one of those situations where I really want the remote technicians to have a clue and pay attention to what I'm telling them is the problem.

I already told them at the beginning what I needed to get the serial console back online - they tried to reboot the server. *groan*

After I update the ticket saying "A reboot isn't going to help", they update it to say "Yes, it's sitting at trying to do an fdisk of the primary disk"

Well I know that - the disk is failing and has all kinds of errors!

So now I've given them a procedure to update the boot.

And it looks like they've just done it! hurrah!

Critter.net down for maintenance

2008-03-25T15:35:48Z

Well, it was a good run:

10:33AM up 431 days, 22:20, 2 users, load averages: 0.03, 0.06, 0.06

Back soon.

Important maintenance over the next week

2008-03-23T23:27:41Z

Looks like one of the hard drives in the server is in the process of becoming unhappy.

Fortunately, because I've noticed this before it gets really unhappy, I'm able to get ready to deal with getting it replaced.

However, to get to that stage I need to get a few things sorted on the server first of all.

So, fair warning to all, there may be periods where critter.net is unavailable either partially or entirely while I make sure that I end up with a pair of mirrored disks - instead of using the other to run backups onto as currently. In order to make sure that I have everything on there that's current, there'll be times when neither mail, web, or other services will be available.

Please keep an eye on this journal, as I'll be posting updates here - such as when services may currently be unavailable.

grrrr?

2008-02-25T14:19:08Z

Is something wrong with critter.net? I tried to update my site last night but none of the files were overwritten. Well, they are over written in Adobe Go-Live, and in the FTP (FileZilla) but on critter.net they're still the old files. I don't know what to do.

Uptime and downtime

2008-01-18T19:15:35Z

As of right now, critter.net has been up for 365 days and 2 hours. While that's not quite a full year yet, it does mean that our uptime has passed 99.999% of the year. Woohoo!!!

Now that we've gotten that far, I'll be considering some downtime for the service to run upgrades of the core operating system. FreeBSD 6.3 was just released, so I'll be upgrading to that in the near future.

mySQL upgrade - done

2008-01-12T17:53:09Z

The mySQL upgrade is complete.

Any problems, let me know.

MySQL planned outage - Saturday

2008-01-11T14:40:14Z

The MySQL database server will be unavailable from ~9am PST (noon EST/5m GMT) tomorrow, Saturday January 12th.

This will be due to upgrades of the MySQL server and recompilations of the various utilities that depend on the current version.

Anticipating this taking no more than 2 hrs, at worst.

All services restored

2008-01-01T23:06:14Z

Not 100% sure what the problem was, but I have some ideas. Seeing 30GB of diskspace disappear before your eyes when apparently no processes are running on that partition is just weird. :P

Some critter.net services unavailable right now

2008-01-01T21:41:38Z

Notably web and email.

Something is eating diskspace, and I need to find out what it is.

Price increase on domain registrations and renewals

2007-11-06T18:45:59Z

Looks like the price on GoDaddy.Com (the service that we used to register domains) has increased.

As such, we've raised the price on domain names purchased through Critter to match (including the ICANN fee and paypal fees). A one year term on a domain is now priced at $10.50 (up from $9.00)

Out of contact for a bit

2007-05-12T01:28:18Z

I'm traveling on a trans-atlantic flight tomorrow, so won't be around in case there's any critter.net issues.

Earliest I'll be back online is 0900 GMT.

FYI.

SSL certificates...

2007-04-10T22:00:48Z

...have all been updated for another year. This time, I got them before they expired. I don't think I missed any, but if I did, let me know. (2007's set of certificates were going to expire by Friday)