... that people are wondering if we are dependable after these outages - 3 now in the last few weeks. The first outage was due to us moving the site from a bad provider to a good provider. the first time TrainBoard has ever moved. The second outage was due to a crash - the server crashed, plain and simple. This time, it was due to the physical move of the server from an old building to a new climate controled, secure location. This was supposed to take a maximum of four hours. Actually, I did not think that they were going to do that this week but they did and four hours turned into much more. I am not sure what happened but I will find out. Obviously, there were problems. We're going to be down again in a few days, but hopefully for just a couple of hours as TrainBoard/RailImages/RailSeek all are moved from the present server to a brand new machine. This should just be a transfer that takes place within a single physical facility from one machine to another. We hope this will be almost seamless. We do apologize for the problems. We hope that this is just the temporary price of progress and that we will be 24/7 with no major downtime starting soon. If you come around and we are not on, it should be due to good things happening. As I said last time, bear with us for a bit. Charlie
Like you said Charlie, it's the price for progress! Small price to pay to help make this the best forum around.
make this the best? wait, i thought we already were the best! and still are! and will be! i understand how computers are.... seeing as i work on them every day of the week.... thanks for your continued hard work and support, its guys like you that keep us going, and we all thank you. i just wish that i wasnt a poor college student and could donate more! thanks, -Rob
I have to admit when Trainboard is down it's like my whole net life is down lol between this site and Rail Images which I also admin I have a lot of vacant time at night. Glad to have them both back and look forward to the move to the new server.
Ditto Paul,didn't know what to do with myself,at least I got some decaling finally done! My hats off to you Charlie for all the hard yards you put into this server,THANKS!
As one who works with high-dollar clinical analyzers that can be put out of order with the untimely failure of a low-dollar chunk of plastic and metal (and cannot explain this simple fact of life to angry doctors who wanted their results on their patients yesterday), I can relate. I didn't get this gray hair from eating lunch I'm sure that after the moves are made, things will settle down PDQ. And someday we'll look back on all this and laugh/groan/run screaming into the night..... [ 13. July 2004, 07:05: Message edited by: friscobob ]
I work with the full-scale computers (mainframes) and frequently have to deal with the migration of systems to upgraded or new hardware. Your service provider should be able to do a migration of a web site with almost no interruption. It takes some careful planning and there will be a period when the system can be accessed in read-only mode. But this minimizes the time when we are totally down.
Charlie. I feel your frustration. It sometimes seems like these machines are getting personal . One small suggestion; please copy your post into the Inspection Pit for "Modelling". As that is my primary interest I bookmark direct to there most visits, so I suspect others may do as well. I came looking in here specially to find out what the problems have been, but other modellers may be feeling like mushrooms .
Peirce, You're correct, they SHOULD be able to make the move with little interruption. However, it seems like a lot of service providers/web sites these days don't want to spend the money to plan, pay overtime for the weekend work, provide extra resources for the move, et al. My home banking web site through my credit union decided to "upgrade" (which is still up for debate whether there's any improvement) their systems over 4th of July weekend. Well, they weren't down just Friday night and early Saturday which is sometimes the case if things go wrong....they were down THURSDAY thru TUESDAY. For a BANKING institution. And when it was all said and done, NONE of our customizations (i.e. bill payment information) were migrated. Needless to say I'm evaluating a move at this point. Anyway, my point is that "high availability" is apparantly a relative term these days. Hang in there Charlie, you've almost got us where we need to be. I don't think anybody's going anywhere. [ 13. July 2004, 18:14: Message edited by: Doug A. ]
We appreciate being advised of what's going on and an estimated time frame, so despite withdrawal pangs, the members will be understanding. Better this is done in the dead of summer, anyway. Al
