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  #61  
Old 03-25-2018, 01:21 PM
tinydancer tinydancer is offline
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John, it's all black magic to me, but I truly thank you for all you do.
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  #62  
Old 03-27-2018, 12:59 PM
John John is offline
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Received notification from the datacenter staff that this week they will have a time set for replacement of the power distribution unit. My guess is that it will probably be replaced within the next 7 to 10 days.

As long as the PDU is the only issue, this should resolve the server power disruption problems and resulting site downtime it has been causing.

If the sporadic reboots continue after the PDU replacement then that will mean it is very likely to be a hardware issue with the server and a bit more work to be done to sort this all out.
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  #63  
Old 04-06-2018, 11:02 PM
aephi alum aephi alum is offline
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I couldn't get onto GC earlier this evening (approx 6pm CDT). I am (obviously) online now, 10pm CDT. Just mentioning this as troubleshooting info for you and the datacenter folks.
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  #64  
Old 04-07-2018, 12:22 AM
John John is offline
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Thanks for reporting that. Lately whenever the site is offline it's while I'm running scans/repairs on the database following a power disruption & resulting server hard reboot. I usually stop the httpd server while running maintenance on the database, so at those times GC is completely inaccessible usually for 15 to 25 minutes. Hopefully these issues will be all sorted out soon.

Other than the inconvenience of taking the site offline as well as having to handle this each time the server reboots, so far things have gone okay managing it this way. Although, very far from optimal.

Yesterday was six weeks since I notified the datacenter staff of the issue. After inquiring again yesterday, the datacenter support staff reported the current status in part as: "there are roughly a dozen clients sharing the cabinet and we have to get confirmation from everyone before we can perform any maintenance"

I suppose that also means they are now in possession of the replacement PDU. I'm extremely disappointed with how long the datacenter has taken to replace the failing PDU. However, this has been the only problem in the 4.5 years I've been hosting with them, so am trying to be patient and reasonable about it. I'm not sure what the norm is in this situation of needing to replace a failing, but not yet failed, PDU. Surely if the PDU completely stopped functioning it would have been replaced almost immediately.
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  #65  
Old 04-07-2018, 10:45 AM
QueenD QueenD is offline
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The data centers excuse for why it’s been 6 weeks and the PDU isn’t replaced is 100% unacceptable. This is not routine maintenance, it’s emergency maintenance. Even for co-location arrangements with data centers, responsible vendors have provisions where the can do emergency maintenance with little notice in situations like this. The fact that they are treating this in such a lax manner would have me doing everything I can to find another data center. What a mess.

Also, thanks so much for keeping things running for us as best you can.
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  #66  
Old 04-08-2018, 07:02 PM
John John is offline
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Finally, PDU replacement maintenance window is scheduled for 8:00PM tonight EST. So only around an hour away from that.

Quote:
Originally Posted by QueenD View Post
6 weeks and the PDU isn’t replaced is 100% unacceptable. This is not routine maintenance, it’s emergency maintenance.
I agree. The way that they handled this, taking so long after verifying that the PDU was "showing signs of failure" on Feb. 23rd is very disappointing.

Quote:
Originally Posted by QueenD View Post
The fact that they are treating this in such a lax manner would have me doing everything I can to find another data center.
Definitely a reason to consider moving away from them. Before all this happened I was actually considering other options but for different reasons.

With the current datacenter they have a lot of pros. The price is right, full peering with Atlantia TIE network, all traffic goes through an Internap FCP. If my server had two power supplies they would be able to provide two independent power feeds (so the server would still stay online if one of the power feeds (or even PDUs) went down).

Also, in 4.5 years (until now), no other unplanned power disruptions or even network disruptions. They may have had one or two planned maintenance windows that took us offline for a few minutes in all that time.

Besides all that, I'm also unsure yet if any of the power issues are due to hardware problems on GC's server. IPMI continues to report that the PSU is OK, but I'm not sure how certain that assessment is. If there are no power disruptions by tomorrow after the PDU replacement tonight then I think at that point it will be very likely to have been all due to the failing datacenter PDU.

Once I can rule out potential server hardware causes I'll be contacting the datacenter company CEO to see what he thinks about how it was handled. One of the reasons I also moved colo hosting to them back in 2013 was because they had a very solid reputation. Even if my server has other issues it still really surprises me that it took 6 weeks to get this sorted out.

Anyhow, hopefully no more power disruptions after tonight.
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  #67  
Old 04-11-2018, 04:18 PM
John John is offline
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Sunday evening, April 8th, the data center's power distribution unit was replaced. Since then not a single power disruption to GC's web server.

As a few days have passed, I think it's now safe to say that the immediate hardware issues which were causing all of the random power losses/reboots are now resolved.
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  #68  
Old 04-11-2018, 09:08 PM
aephi alum aephi alum is offline
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Great news!

Thank you again for all your hard work, John.
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  #69  
Old 04-11-2018, 09:15 PM
AZ-AlphaXi AZ-AlphaXi is offline
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Thank you so much!
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