Forum maintenance - downtime notice

[anwar]

It is pretty rare these days, but we are going to have a downtime on the site tomorrow early morning between 1am and 4am IST (ie Saturday morning) for some server maintenance.  The site will not be down for the whole duration, just a part of it, but we are unable to give an exact time as to when the maintenance will start.

So if you see the site inaccessible during these hours, please check back a bit later

[gauravag]

Wow. Anything exciting we should expect following the upgrade ?

[anwar]

Nope, just routine data-center (i.e. hardware) stuff.

[anwar]

Done.

[sahilkit]

hardware maintenance ? that means we are getting a new super fast Peta-byte server 

seriously i feel the site is loading faster 

[sandeepm]

Hi Anwar,
Just a bit of Information needed regarding the IDC.
Where is the IDC Located and what is the current bandwidth pipe allocated and data transfer/month.
Sandeep

[anwar]

We are on a dedicated server somewhere in Texas, no real bandwidth limits, and 100Mb uplink.

[anwar]

We have another maintenance shutdown starting in 15 minutes, and may last for up to couple of hours.  Just FYI.

[anwar]

We had some server maintenance this morning that went a bit south, so took longer than expected.  Sorry for the downtime on the forum.

[anwar]

We are having an issue with a spam attack on the server, it is (and will be) slow for some time. 

[rajathv8]

Hope it gets resolved soon as this is the only site i go online for

[anwar]

Yep, found the issue. Resolved

Just wasted a holiday on it though 

[anwar]

Oops, looks like yesterday's spam bomb caused some logs to fill up the disk space, the issue is resolved. Sorry for the downtime !

[anwar]

One more.  The overworked gentlemen at the datacenter rebooted the server hosting this server 4 times, while they were supposed to be checking another server that is not even ours   In consolation, they did apologize profusely !

So if you experienced issues earlier accessing RC India, now you know why !

[anwar]

Looks like we had an issue on the server which caused outage of services for some time.  Should be OK now.

[Dharmik]

They are sending DDOS attack i think. Never seen forum down for such long time.

[anwar]

Nope, just that ASL (Atomic Secure Linux) got a little too greedy/overprotective.

[anwar]

Time for another server upgrade.  Please note that RCI will be moved to another server between 2am and 4am this morning (so starting in a little over 3 hours).

Since the IP address will change, random flakiness is possible even after the migration window, due to DNS propagation delays.

[saahil]

"Since the IP address will change, random flakiness is possible even after the migration window, due to DNS propagation delays."
anwar bhai do u know
"what is co-mutual tangential point with reference to axis of symmetry in triangular space and time"

[KALYANPRODHAN]

Perhaps no delay now.
started at 5am.

[anwar]

Pretty much everyone will be caught up within 24 hours, most within 6 hours.

[anwar]

anwar bhai do u know
"what is co-mutual tangential point with reference to axis of symmetry in triangular space and time"

God unleashed Google on us for a reason   "So that thy may seek the truth" !

[raja_mastana]

If we enter just rcindia.org in browser - some default parallel desk page is opening

[anwar]

Yep, that is because some DNS servers still have the old IP address cached.  Exactly what I was mentioning above.  This is expected behavior. 

Flushing your DNS cache *might* help, by forcing your PC to get it from upstream DNS servers (which themselves may have the old values, so this is not guaranteed).  In Windows, the command is "ipconfig /flushdns".

In any case, this will settle down in a few more hours, and hopefully we will not have to revisit this for a while.

[anwar]

Looks like we had a space allocation issue that rendered RCI unavailable for a little while. Thank you Vinay for bringing it to my attention, it has been fixed.