Unscheduled downtime

Post by **learner** » Mon Jan 21, 2008 5:02 pm

As many have noticed, the BZFlag list server and this site went down today for several hours. The problem was caused by the disk drives for the main list server filled up completely and went unnoticed (by me) until morning (it happened in the middle of the night, EST). Needless to say, the problem was trivial to resolve and operations have been restored. Thanks go out to ts, Manu, and MinuteElectron for noticing and working on the problem.

For those that aren't already aware, the list server is already in the process of being upgraded to bigger/better/faster hardware. The new server has more space and sits on an even faster network connection so there should be even less downtime in the future. That said, the migration of all the data on the existing server to the new hardware will take considerable time to copy and validate. If all goes well, you might not even notice the change. There's no set timeframe for completion but it will likely be within the next month or so and I'll probably send out a message when it's complete.

Cheers!
Sean

LJuk · Post by **LJuk** » Sun Jan 27, 2008 1:19 pm

I still can't access it - didn't the domain expire yesterday?

If so, why can't I access it when everyone else can?

I have to use a proxy to use this forum!

Post by **learner** » Sun Jan 27, 2008 1:31 pm

No, the domain didn't actually expire, but did get close to expiring. The name service provider apparently didn't send out a renewal/expiration notice to Tim causing an automatic DNS update to get propagated that pointed bzflag.org to a placeholder IP address. Everything was rectified within a couple hours and another DNS update was sent out restoring the bzflag.org domain, but DNS updates can take a very long while to fully propagate and for DNS caches to time out.

If you're still not seeing the main website and/or have to access this forum through a proxy, then your ISP's DNS probably has a cached result. You can ask them to flush their cache to get an update, or just wait.

Also the domain name problems we had yesterday have absolutely nothing to do with the original topic of this thread.