Tag: Problems

16 hour down time or Vicis est viaticus Part II

Here’s what happened. The load increased, clogged CPU time and my account was suspended during my night for overusing system resources.

It took me 10 hours to get my sites back. Tickets did not help, but the live chat did the trick.

I still believe that the problem #1 is MySQL database. MySQL locks up, PHP processes spin trying to get the info (I think problem #2 is PHP). However, nobody was able to find the mysql logs to prove me right or wrong.

It’s much easier to just disable the account, than to have a look at what/where/why the problem is, or simply kill the CPU/RAM hungry PHP processes.

The provider wants me to migrate to the “Business class” (5 times more expensive). I’m seriously thinking about that…

Bugs in Firefox 3.6 and web-design

Update: Fixed for Firefox 3.6. Actually, it was not an FF bug, but following the standard. The background of the boxes will be broken in Internet Explorer which is buggy. Chrome renders OK.

Firefox 3.6 is out but the bug related to element positioning is still there. So if you are going to upgrade you will see that the design is broken.

Looks like it’s the time to rewrite the internals again… Oh my …

Recovering the site

$#$%^&  happens…

Probably more often than we would like it (“like” is not a good word here) to happen.

Update 19 Jul, 2009 @ 19:48

It’s nice to find the site suspended when you’ve just come back from a busy vacation… Instead of taking simple troubleshooting steps, the providers decided (again) to simply suspend the account. Next time I will have to find another provider (again). The reason is: overusing the system resources. The actual reason is unknown. Denial of service? Possibly. Can be easily detected by the provider. They even have a specific paragraph in their services list.

OK, anyway, the site has almost disappeared from Google (again) and lost “reputation points”. I’ve become a “phobia” person. I’m afraid of losing stuff. Losing time, energy, money, information, privacy, health, etc… I make backups at least twice a day, I check processes every 5 minutes. Unfortunately you can’t backup/clone everything. But unfortunately you can backup/clone problems.

Jeez.. I love that… Not …

Continue reading “Recovering the site”

Crash happens

And it indeed happened. Right after I paid for the next 6 month and additional traffic (it’s huge!). It took the hosting company almost two days to recover the service and took me a day to recover the site. The unavoidable stream of gloomy thoughts:

– Why do I still spend my time, efforts and money on all that stuff (yeah, that crappy feeling again)? Apart from the educational part of it?
– Do not rely upon the provider, back up frequently (fortunately I had a backup)
– Isn’t it the time to change the hoster (ha! right after I have extended the contract?)
– Dynamic database based super ultra CMS driven fully automatic everything’s included website is still not as reliable and predictable as plain file based every-change-takes-half-an-hour one. One glitch in the database or in the software (WordPress is not that brilliant as it looks on their website) and you’re stuck with garbled pages.
– OK, back to tracing, troubleshooting, tweaking, profiling, in short all the not supposed to be visible to a normal user stuff.
– Hey, where’s the promised fun? It’s a fetish site to begin with!
– When I was composing the post the server stopped working again… Pissed off…

%-&

Bugs, glitches, spooky features, illnesses…

Usually these things happen simultaneously.  Regardless of their predictability.

  1. Suddenly it happened again.  Something broke. Just like the last time. But unlike last time the blog completely disappeared from Internet Explorer.
  2. My son caught a virus. High temperature, etc.
  3. The blog admin panel stopped responding.
  4. It was the time to upgrade the operating system on my home server. But the upgrade program refused to upgrade it with an absolutely idiotic error.
  5. Got rid of the error and upgraded the server. But the graphical interface (along with the rest of my home network) gone with the wind.
  6. 3 days and nights later after I tried almost everything I decided to downgrade the system. But just when I was ready to start the downgrading I discovered (thanks to the developers blog) that it is a feature of the new system and there is a simple workaround.
  7. The server was back, most of the annoying bugs were fixed, but the blog was still not working.
  8. 2 days later the blog started to work again. I did nothing. Apparently it was something wrong with the hoster ‘s webserer (broken redirecting).
  9. My son looks OK.
  10. Still tired… And the new working week is about to begin in 5 hours.
  11. Tea? Coffee? Anybody?
  12. %-&


Something’s broken…

Update 2008-12-22 @ 04:00:04: And here it begins again… Is it related to the load?

Update 2008-12-21 @ 20:45:09: Hm… Something’s fixed… At least it was not me. There was nothing in the error logs.  The site owners/admins? Dunno… Was about to downgrade the WordPress… Anyway… Everything is  back to normal.

Some parts of the website are not working correctly. It looks like a system/web-server error, but I can’t prove that.  Probably the admins are doing something. Or there is another attack.

I tweaked some things, but could not fix everything. Let’s see if it gets better tomorrow.