Saturday, August 07, 2004
Thursday, August 05, 2004
Special: For the next 24-48 hours, I am testing out a new route. Messages will therefore only cost 1 pence per SMS!
I can't guarantee when the prices will be changed back, so check back here regularly. At the end of this trial, I'll have to put the cost back to what it currently is (3.8p to most destinations).
I can't guarantee when the prices will be changed back, so check back here regularly. At the end of this trial, I'll have to put the cost back to what it currently is (3.8p to most destinations).
Wednesday, August 04, 2004
Update: Everything should now be working correctly. The problems seem to have been very much less severe than I thought; after a complete rebuild of the file system (for those interested: ReiserFS is wonderful!) everything seems to be back online and working. If you're getting this page instead of the normal vgsmail home-page your DNS cache is out-of-date: you can probably get there by going to http://sms.vgsmail.com for the next day or so (don't bookmark that address is it's not guarenteed to stay around in the long term).
As I said yesterday, I'm working on making some big back-room changes which would involve moving the whole of vgsmail to a much more reliable and robust site. If things go to plan, this will have no effect on any other part of the system (including the price of messaging).
Again, sorry for the downtime...
As I said yesterday, I'm working on making some big back-room changes which would involve moving the whole of vgsmail to a much more reliable and robust site. If things go to plan, this will have no effect on any other part of the system (including the price of messaging).
Again, sorry for the downtime...
Tuesday, August 03, 2004
Update: I have isolated the problem to the hard-drive. I don't think the drive has actually crashed, but it is certainly behaving very strangely. I believe this is related to the storm we had earlier, even though the machine is isolated. Unfortunately I do not have a RAID drive.
I am going to try the following, in order, however there is relatively little I can do today:
- attempt to reconstruct the current drive;
- attempt to boot the machine from an alternative backup drive I have;
- rebuild a new drive.
My current estimate is that this will take a maximum of 3 days.
So:
First, my most sincere apologies. This is the first down-time we have had since February, and I must admit to having become slightly complacent. I should have had a backup drive on-hand ready to swap in. A side-effect of my not-for-profit status is that I can't afford much spare hardware, and so this is slightly inevitable from time-to-time.
Second, I had some relatively big behind-the-scenes changes under-way which I will annouce later. However, this should hopefully stop this happening again.
Third, as a very small consolation, I'm going to credit you with 10 free messages as soon as the machine is back up and running. To qualify, please send an email to temp030704@vgsmail.com with your userid as subject (the rest of the email can be empty). Only emails received before the system is back up-and-running will be accepted.
I am going to try the following, in order, however there is relatively little I can do today:
- attempt to reconstruct the current drive;
- attempt to boot the machine from an alternative backup drive I have;
- rebuild a new drive.
My current estimate is that this will take a maximum of 3 days.
So:
First, my most sincere apologies. This is the first down-time we have had since February, and I must admit to having become slightly complacent. I should have had a backup drive on-hand ready to swap in. A side-effect of my not-for-profit status is that I can't afford much spare hardware, and so this is slightly inevitable from time-to-time.
Second, I had some relatively big behind-the-scenes changes under-way which I will annouce later. However, this should hopefully stop this happening again.
Third, as a very small consolation, I'm going to credit you with 10 free messages as soon as the machine is back up and running. To qualify, please send an email to temp030704@vgsmail.com with your userid as subject (the rest of the email can be empty). Only emails received before the system is back up-and-running will be accepted.
Update: At present I am unable to reboot the machine correctly. I believe the problem is related to the thunderstorm we had earlier. I will keep you updated.
Outage: The machine running vgsmail appears to have crashed rather badly. I am currently off-site and can therefore not access the machine for the next few hours. Until I have tried to reboot it, I can't ascertain exactly what has gone wrong and how long it will take to fix it (it might be that a reboot is all it needs).
My apologies for the down-time. I'll keep you up-to-date via this page as I find out more.
My apologies for the down-time. I'll keep you up-to-date via this page as I find out more.
