April 2008

Password Reset For Some Email Accounts – April 23, 2008

We had a database problem today that required some email account passwords to be regenerated. We apologize for the inconvenience, and have contacted most of the affected customers by phone or alternate means.

Network Maintenance – April 21, 2008

On May 5th, between midnight and 6AM, Sprint will be shutting down their network for four hours. The network will automatically failover to one of the other providers, so you should only see some network slowdowns and possibly some outages for thirty seconds or so as the routes switchover.

VMWare 1.0.5 Server patch for 2.6.25 kernel – April 18, 2008 (read more)

I had the privilege of installing VMWare 1.0.5 on a brand new 2.6.25 kernel. I downloaded the 2.6.XX patch for vmware 1.0.4, applied the one change from asm to linux in vcpuset.h. That had worked for me before when using 1.0.5 on a 2.6.24 kernel, but today I downloaded a 2.6.25 kernel for someone and of course, someone changed something slightly, causing the vmware module (vmnet) to no longer compile. Fortunately for me, a small bit of hacking fixed it, and now I can go to bed.

Maintenance Update – April 05, 2008

I had hoped that this blog would be used for more interesting things other than outage reports, but so far, that hasn't happened.

This morning a circuit breaker blew at the ISP, causing one of the servers (containing one customer) to go down for 30 minutes. The power switches are probably going to be reorganized today, and all of the servers might be rebooted at some point, not exactly sure what the status is at this point. If that outage occurs, it should be for a minute or two for the affected servers.

The good news is that the last outage was in August of 2006, so we are doing pretty well. I recently discovered a company that is reporting statistics on the uptime of our first server, so that is kind of neat. They don't appear to check very often, so I am not sure if the statistics can be counted as that accurate, but for now, having them report 100% uptime shows that I am not making it up.