Theatre Australia

your portal for australian theatre

Where were we?

Mon, 16 July 2007, 10:09 am
administrator4 posts in thread

This site experienced a lengthy outage late last week until this morning. We've lost no data or information during the outage, but clearly we were off air due to the problem for several days.

I'm working with our hosts at Informed Technology to try and determine the cause of the outage. There are some issues with the database server that I hope will be resolved by new hardware. In the meantime, I'll see if I can arrange some sort of a backup plan that at least ensures

  1. there's some notification for visitors that there's a problem rather than timing out or providing a blank page or perhaps
  2. the information on the site is available but blocks any new contributions until the problem is resolved

My apologies for any frustration or inconvenience caused.  

 

 

Thread (4 posts)

administratorMon, 16 July 2007, 10:09 am

This site experienced a lengthy outage late last week until this morning. We've lost no data or information during the outage, but clearly we were off air due to the problem for several days.

I'm working with our hosts at Informed Technology to try and determine the cause of the outage. There are some issues with the database server that I hope will be resolved by new hardware. In the meantime, I'll see if I can arrange some sort of a backup plan that at least ensures

  1. there's some notification for visitors that there's a problem rather than timing out or providing a blank page or perhaps
  2. the information on the site is available but blocks any new contributions until the problem is resolved

My apologies for any frustration or inconvenience caused.  

 

 

NaMon, 16 July 2007, 10:44 am

I did a quick DNS lookup

I did a quick DNS lookup over the weekend for Theatre Aus (I wondered if it would give me any info on whether I could still access the site, or whether it was my computer being narky)... Anyway it suggested that the site has a single point of failure - maybe there needs to be a way to get the site onto two servers in case something goes wrong? (Then again, I don't know how costly that is, or whether IT will do it...) I know my only frustration was that I didn't know what was going on, so I think a notification would be a good idea. Sticky Apple Legs www.freewebs.com/stickyapplelegs Puppets in Melbourne www.thepromptcopy.com/pip
administratorTue, 17 July 2007, 03:07 pm

Where we are

Yay!

Delighted to advise that after a pretty torturous few weeks where we suffered the longest outages we've ever experienced due to a failing database server, our hosts at Informed Technology have our database up and running on a new server.

:-)

"we finally replaced the old database server with a new machine, so from this morning the database should be faster and much more reliable"

In effect the site is relatively complex, so the new database server won't have a huge impact on speed, but clearly we should be back to the usual high level of availability with far fewer outages.
 

 

NaTue, 17 July 2007, 04:21 pm

Yay!!

:flowers: to both Grant and IT for the good news! Sticky Apple Legs www.freewebs.com/stickyapplelegs Puppets in Melbourne www.thepromptcopy.com/pip
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