We are having some serious uptime problems at the moment... We're doing what we can to get zaphod back up again, but we're hampered by the fact that we don't have physical access to the servers.
I'm going to maintain this page with new information as it comes in; if you want more immediate information, please join us in our IRC channel, #termisoc on oftc.net. Alternatively, you can email me (DanC)
Zaphod is UP again! Same problem as last time; we're taking a look at ways to mitigate this problem, including daemons to watch the connection, a backup server on another site, and convincing ILS to give us better support. We'll keep you posted.
Zaphod is DOWN again! Oh yes, it's true. Literally as ILS closes for the weekend, our connection dies. Both Zaphod and Trillian are out, so it's almost certainly ILS's dodgy switch again. As ever, you can catch the latest by keeping an eye on this page, joining the IRC channel, or by emailing me.
The more elephant memoried of you may remember that a widget was created to prevent this from happening. Evidently it hasn't worked; anyone got any more ideas?
Zaphod is up again! Apparently the network cards in our machines failed to properly negotiate a connection with the switch again. Neither ILS or us is willing to take responsibility for it, but it's back up again.
We've implemented a widget to attempt to renogiate the connection if this happens again - hopefully this will help prevent this happening again.
Zaphod is down again. The symptons are identical to before, so we're assuming ILS is at fault again. Ben went and had a word, but apparently anyone who has a clue is in Smeaton doing network upgrades, and we can't have access till Monday.
Again, we are seriously, amazingly sorry about all this - our servers are working fine, but ILS just doesn't care enough about us to give us any decent uptime. While we are eternally grateful for the connection, downtime like this seriously hits our credibility, and hurts our users.
There's a chance that the network upgrades in Smeaton have screwed our connection somehow, and they will fix it and our switch will come back online. We'll keep you posted.
As predicted, it was a networking problem. Apparently ILS made a bit of a cock up with their switch configuration, which was preventing Zaphod from reaching the outside world. We'll keep tabs on it for a bit longer, but I think we're doing OK now.
We are now heading on for two full days of downtime :(
Ben went to have a look but arrived after ILS had shut so now news. Basically, we're still screwed.
Servers are still down; will keep testing throughout the day.
Given that we haven't had a peek out of the servers, and given when the servers went down, we're fairly confident ILS has unplugged us without warning. Thanks ILS, you guys are awesome. Anyway, we'll know more tomorrow; we'll send someone to take a look at the physical servers tomorrow some time, but chances are they'll come up on their own when they get plugged in. We'll keep you posted
Here's the situation: we can't get any of the websites, we can't get mail, and we can't get an SSH connection. On the other hand, Trillian appears to be down as well, which might mean it's networking related at the university end.
We can't get at the servers physically because ILS is only open until four everyday, and they have the keys to the cupboard. Also, the majority of the technical team are busy courseworking.
Last week we were taken offline by ILS during some networking upgrades; connection was restored the next day, but we've been having sporadically poor performance since then.