File server shuffling
Posted (September 18th, 2007 at 8:30 pm PST) by KellyOn Thursday night, September 20th starting at 10pm Pacific time, we will be shuffling a handful of fileservers for the Randy and Spunky clusters. Each move should take no longer than 15-20 minutes per file server. This is to take inefficiency out of our racks and allow us to deploy even more newer/better/faster file servers! During the time that the file servers are down, your websites and email will be inaccessible, however, no email will be lost. We hope to finish by midnight.
These are the file servers which we are moving. If you have files on these servers they will be inaccessible for about 15-20 minutes.
compressor curler smasher tanker churner digger potter scraper charger nailer screwer switcher
Update @ 10:53 PM, September 20, 2007: We are finished, and have been for half an hour more or less. We wound up only needed to move two of the filers listed above, and they were the two smallest of the batch. No servers crashed, and total downtime was around 4 minutes each filer. Please contact technical support if you are having any problems!
22 Responses to “File server shuffling”
What’s really going on there? I feel like DH isn’t being entirely straight with us…
All host having problems, perform maintenance, etc… but unlike Dreamhost, they generally don’t share the info with the public.
Handful? That list looks like a few more than a handful… 
Anyway, thanks for the heads-up and all your hard work. Hope everything goes smoothly!
Most hosts, from my experience, don’t have nearly as many problems as DreamHost does. I’ve had more downtime with DreamHost than I have with any other host, and I was paying LESS for the other hosts. So, “you get what you pay for” doesn’t always apply.
Great… I hope this takes care of some of the many issues we’ve had lately. I really like DH and it’s setup. Is this supposed to be a long term fix?
what they say:
“This is to take inefficiency out of our racks and allow us to deploy even more newer/better/faster file servers! ”
what they mean:
“This is to take inefficiency out of our racks and allow us to pack even more users onto our servers!”
This is BS. Last night in support emails, they said everything would be up and running by today. I’ve already stalled a job interview that requires viewing my site until today, and now nothing will be up and running until Thursday? Why didn’t they move all our files on a backup server before doing all this? We have to live with two days or inaccessible sites?
@eeyartee - Did you read the announcement? They aren’t doing this until TONIGHT.
[quote]On Thursday night, September 20th starting at 10pm Pacific time, we will be shuffling a handful of fileservers for the Randy and Spunky clusters.[/quote]
So any problems you are having now aren’t related to this announcement. Submit a support ticket.
Oops, I’m a day ahead, today is Wednesday, not Thursday.
Same point applies - the maintenance announced in this entry does not have anything to do with current problems, since it hasn’t happened yet!
Right now, I’m happy. Virtually no downtime since all the network problems 2 weeks or so ago. Unbelievable!
I’m the same, no downtime now for a few months!
What I want to know is why there should be any real amount of downtime to swap file servers? If you rsync them first, rsync them again (just to catch anything that might have changed during the long rsync), and then just flip to the new one, the worst that will happen is anything that was changed between the last rsync and the switch would be “lost” (or on the wrong file server).
Thinking from my perspective, I would rather “lose” 20 minutes of data than have my site down for 20 minutes (and by lose, I mean local files only… since all of my data is in mysql anyway. But maybe that’s just me… people with flat files might have more problems with losing file system data.
this week my site was down and inaccessible for hours at a time on three different days. Now it will go down again. What a horrible week.
Wow, I feel like I’m lucky. I hardly ever have any problems - I’ve probably only contacted support for downtime 2 or 3 times in the 3 years I’ve been here. And all times the problems were resolved quickly.
yeah maybe i am just on a crappy machine. Anyone else on doheny now and having problems? I can’t even ping the site.
Hope it goes on without any glitches.
Is this related to the slowness I’m seeing on Sanborn? I’ve already contacted support about it, and they said that it’ll be done by thie end of this week.
is this starting early because doheny seems down again?
There is a server named sanborn? I wonder how it’s named. Anything to do with this US Navy ship?
http://ww2db.com/ship_spec.php?ship_id=308&list=Other
On second thought, probably not…
Guys Always keep a copy of your site on a hard drive backup @ home, so u can carry with u and view offline if possible.
thanksss
Cool, the post.
Thanks for the information.
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It seems that DH has been having a LOT of problems with its file servers lately. My website has been down more often than it has been up over the past two weeks. This is a serious problem for me, as I’m teaching a class and we are using Moodle as the collaboration platform. At this point I have serious questions about continuing to use DH for the class. What’s really going on there? I feel like DH isn’t being entirely straight with us…