Down and Up and Down and Up

So the blog went away again, and now it's back. If you care, I've attached dreamhost account of what went wrong.

Meanwhile, the law school's email went down today for a while, and the internal network remains nearly useless as it moves data at a crawl. The law school borrowed a $100,000 sniffing tool from the university, but rumor has it (all we get is rumor…) that this didn't solve, or even identify, the problem. Oh joy!

Here's what Dreamhost had to say:

We're very VERY sorry about this.. we had a network outage this morning between the hours of 2AM and 10AM PST (GMT -8). A failure by our primary and secondary routers caused sporadically slow or unresponsive connections to all DreamHost sites and services.

We apologize for it taking so long for the service to be restored.. we were on it almost immediately but it was a long painful process. Even now that the network is working again we're still looking into what caused the problem in the first place.

Then, possibly due to the sudden flood of backed up network requests, once the network did come back up, immediately about 20 of our shared webhosting servers crashed in unison.. keeping some sites down a little bit longer as we rebooted them. At this point, everything should be okay again.

We actually ordered a brand new router just last week and ironically it hadn't arrived yet. This new router should definitely mark the end of these sorts of network troubles. It's been a bad two weeks, we know.. 🙁

Also, we're sorry about not being able to get an announcement out immediately.. we attempted to but had such a hard time reaching our own internal services we couldn't. Only once things were almost better were we able to get in and announce what was going on (a couple of hours ago).

Like I said, they're nice. Most of the time it works great. But when it fails, it fails hard.