downtime

3rd party JS libraries cause downtime

Facebook Connect went down hard tonight. HuffPo reports that their site was redirecting to a Facebook error page, even when people weren’t attempting to log in.

It makes me more comfortable with our decision to strip so many 3rd party javascripts from GigaOM during our last redesign.

Site Back Online, Further Downtime Expected

This site and a number of other projects are hosted on a Mac Mini that normally sits on my desk. Thing is…my desk moved. And, unfortunately, I didn’t confirm the firewall rules for the network in my new office before bringing the machine over. Thankfully Chris was happy to put the Mini on a different VLAN, and that solved everything (my other machines remain on the new “secure” network…ugh).

In the no too distant future, however, I’ll be moving the site again. This time to a private server somewhere. Varnish, the HTTPd accelerator, is a big part of my plans for that, though. So if I’m lucky (or smart, but better to bet on lucky), I’ll be able to do it without any additional downtime. Hopefully. And even if there is some downtime, it won’t be 24 hours again.

The Flickr Is A Series Of Tubes

It’s hard to be angry with Flickr about unexpected downtime when they post funny things like this. For my part, this is more than just an excuse to link to DJ Ted Stevens’ Internet Song (yeah, “the internet is a series of tubes”), it’s an excuse to point out how Flickr apparently knows how to […] » about 100 words

DDOS’d

My hosting provider sent along the following message:

We have experienced a DDOS attack today January 4th, which resulted in latency across the entire network. During this time your domain, email, ftp and other services may have appeared to be offline, or intermittent. Our techs have been working as quickly as possible to block the attack and get the network back up to speed.

I was relieved to know that the unexpected downtime was the result of something I’d done. The problem, and I can feel for my hosting provider here, is that DDOS attacks aren’t so easy to block (while also leaving the network open enough to be usable), so I wouldn’t be surprised if performance here is rather variable for a while.