Upgrading file server gloat
Posted (June 10th, 2008 at 10:12 am PST) by KellyWe are upgrading the file server gloat to the next update release of Solaris. This should resolve the crashing issues we have been experiencing over the past week or two. We have tested this upgrade on multiple other machines and it has cleared up the SATA driver bug with which the servers seem to ship.
This upgrade will unfortunately take a few hours to complete, during which time your data will not be available.
Update: 7:00pm Pacific This took longer than expected due to a missing step in the instructions Sun provided. We brought the server up for the latter half of the day, however brought it back down again once we had the missing step confirmed. Everything should be smooth sailing now. Please contact support if your website is still down. I apologize for the extended downtime.
7 Responses to “Upgrading file server gloat”
How about whenever you have downtime instead of putting our websites in a never ending time out, you can serve us a temporary page explaining that the network is down and linking to a blogpost such as this explaining what’s happened.
I also appreciate the high transparency that Dreamhost always offers us, but am also concerned with the frequency servers are taken down for maintenance or quick fixes with little or no warning. Maintenance such as patches should be planned far in advance whenever possible. That’s what I do with my customers at my job, I don’t think why Dreamhost couldn’t do something similar?
I do agree with Tom Nowell. It will be fair to do what he says, as i have lost a lot because of the downtime from the last 2 weeks, and now again. My website visitors have no idea why my website is down and not working. They will probably never come back as they will remember that website as a non working thing.
Please do something about it ! All the time my website is down costs me a lot of money.
Having a heads up for server software upgrades or patches will be very welcome. I know DH do advices and posts whenever a planned maintenance is in order. If they do the same when upgrading server software that will result in brief downtime it’ll save us a bundle, specially for us who have Internet ad campaigns. I am subscribed to this blog and check my email several times a day, so really all I need will be a one or two days in anticipation.
Anyone else having problems with email?
“DreamHost is very good at attacking problems quickly.” Dreamhost has nothing but constant problems because their infrastructure is built on crap. When they “upgrade” they are bringing in somebody else’s trash or reject servers to replace their own broken servers. This is all conjecture on my part, but look at the downtime schedule. That will tell the truth The equipment is overtaxed and underpowered to handle the loads DreamHost gives them. For all of you that are about to say DH rocks and I get what I pay for…. F you.
DreamHost is a bunch of overpaid amateurs.
DreamHost is very good at attacking problems quickly. I know this fixes a significant crashing problem, however…
From the perception of this status blog, DreamHost just decides off-handedly to roll out various updates whenever they happen to feel the urge. To us customers, services just get taken offline at the apparent random whim of DreamHost staff.
I’m sure there’s much more internal testing, planning, and scheduling. Please consider a better process, in which DreamHost informs customers a couple days (at least) in advanced when there is to be PLANNED downtime. This would allow us to inform our end-users of expected outage, and even set up a fallback mode.
“Low Severity” to YOU can be extremely severe to US (e.g., site suddenly gone without warning, users confused).
That said, thank you very much for your timely, informative status reporting. It’s one of the best features of DreamHost.