July 04, 2008

Happy Birthday, America!

From all your friends at mee.nu.

You're looking pretty good for a 232-year-old.

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May 20, 2008

Slow Performance And Timeouts

Hi folks.

We apologise for the slow performance of the system over the last 24 hours or so.  A process that is importing new blogs into the system got a little carried away in its task, creating many, many duplicate records and gradually bringing the system to its knees.

The process has now been sacked, and normal service has been restored.*

We're working to clean up all the duplicate records - which only affect the blogs being imported, not any blogs you might have created yourselves - and once that is completed and the problem fixed, we will very cautiously restart the process.

* Albeit at great expense and with occasional llamas...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:50 AM | Comments (186) | Add Comment
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May 14, 2008

Smoothing Things Out

We've re-organised our backups so that they no longer cause any interruption to server.  It was taking 30 seconds twice a day, but with all the new blogs joining us that was up to over a minute, so we've changed our backup strategy.

Still twice a day, but now you shouldn't even notice (unless you pay very close attention to the timing stats at the bottom of your blog page...)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:09 AM | Comments (161) | Add Comment
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May 11, 2008

Planned Maintenance - Monday May 12th 12am - 2am GMT

Hi everyone.

We'll be doing some work on the system later today, loading up a whole lot of new blogs.

The service will be up and running throughout this process, but you may experience the occasional slowdown, where you'll need to wait a few seconds for something that's normally instantaneous.

We apologise for that, but I'm sure you'll be happy to be joined by all these new friends!

Update: We've postponed this for 12 hours to do a little more tweaking to the conversion process.  The title reflects the updated schedule.

Update: Running now!  The good news is that everything is running very smoothly so far.  The bad news is...  Actually, there's no bad news!  Well, I think I may have to do a little patching on one of the 250 blogs being imported (the theme didn't load properly) but that's all.  Looks like all that preparation is actually paying off!

Update: And - done!  There'll be a little cleanup work the next day or so, but it all went pretty well.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM | Comments (144) | Add Comment
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May 01, 2008

Unplanned Semi-Outage, Or, No, We Do Not Want Your Cheap Virtual Products

Apologies again.

A massive spam wave emanating from China took out our sister server, and gave mee.nu the DNS wobblies as well.  We'll be re-arranging our DNS this weekend - look for a notice on that.  There may be a little downtime while that happens, but that will be better than the major downtime we get currently when something bad happens.

Update: We've completed the reconfiguration of our DNS servers, and we're just awaiting the update of the root servers.  Once this is completed, mee.nu should be isolated from outside server failures - unless the .nu domain itself goes flaky again, which has only happened once since 1997.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:48 PM | Comments (122) | Add Comment
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April 16, 2008

Unplanned Outage

Sorry about any downtime you might have experience over the past few hours.  We lost a drive in our secondary server, which caused intermittent DNS problems, which meant you couldn't reach mee.nu at times even though the main server was up and running just fine.

Though it's a freak occurrence that two entirely different problems both affected our DNS, we will be changing our DNS configuration to prevent this sort of thing in the future.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:51 AM | Comments (135) | Add Comment
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March 08, 2008

DNS Issues

Hi everyone.

We're having some DNS issues right now.  The DNS delegation for the whole mee.nu domain was accidentally deleted by the domain registry, and due to the way DNS works, it's going to take a few hours before it's fully working again. 

Right now. the main mee.nu site seems to be working, but indivudual blogs may or may not work.  This should gradually fix itself over the next few hours as records are updated.

If you continue to experience problems, email me at help@mu.nu (normally it would be help@mee.nu, but that might not work right now) and I'll look into it further.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:43 PM | Comments (163) | Add Comment
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