Downtime

[viscousmemories]

I apologize to anyone who was impacted by the last 30 minutes or so of downtime. Apparently our host had to apply some patches to the server, and due to their sensitive nature they were unable to give us advance warning.

When and if they provide me with more details I'll elaborate.

Thanks for your patience,

vm

[D. Scarlatti]

While you're at it, you better apologize for using "impact" as a verb.

[viscousmemories]

While you're at it, you better apologize for using "impact" as a verb.

Usage Note: The use of impact as a verb meaning “to have an effect” often has a big impact on readers. Eighty-four percent of the Usage Panel disapproves of the construction to impact on, as in the phrase social pathologies, common to the inner city, that impact heavily on such a community; fully 95 percent disapproves of the use of impact as a transitive verb in the sentence Companies have used disposable techniques that have a potential for impacting our health. ·It is unclear why this usage provokes such a strong response, but it cannot be because of novelty. Impact has been used as a verb since 1601, when it meant “to fix or pack in,” and its modern, figurative use dates from 1935. It may be that its frequent appearance in the jargon-riddled remarks of politicians, military officials, and financial analysts continues to make people suspicious. Nevertheless, the verbal use of impact has become so common in the working language of corporations and institutions that many speakers have begun to regard it as standard. It seems likely, then, that the verb will eventually become as unobjectionable as contact is now, since it will no longer betray any particular pretentiousness on the part of those who use it.
I shall not apologize for being on the cutting edge. :P

[viscousmemories]

The earlier promised details:

To the best of my understanding, there was an issue with the RAID BIOS which led to a lack of notification when a drive failed. This caused situations on certain systems where single failed drives would not register as failed, and would go undetected. When a second drive failed, the array would fail, resulting in us having to rebuild the whole array and restore everyone from backup. We discovered this with a non-VPS client server with similar hardware specifications. What appeared to us as a single failed drive turned out to be a 2nd failed drive, causing us to have to rebuild/restore the system. We have already detected and replaced failed VPS server drives which have been caught by the new software. One other side effect is corrupt data which, when left unchecked, can turn into a situation of severe data loss as well.

Security to us isn't simply protecting customers from hackers and exploits. It also means protecting your data from the inside-out. As some customers noticed, data corruption had already begun, and letting this continue was unacceptable. All RAID arrays are now functioning beautifully, all spare drives are verified, and all systems can now safely sustain 2 simultaneous drive failures, both of which will be visible to us in real-time.

[JoeP]

While you're at it, you better apologize for using "impact" as a verb.

I'm sure I posted this but it must have disappeared in monopolistic caverns of Telkom SA.

I have no problem with vm's verbing.