Hey everyone, and happy new year!
Sorry about that super long downtime there. Yesterday (Sunday) morning at 10:03AM PST our server suffered a physical hardware failure, apparently a power supply failure. Unfortunately despite opening a ticket with our hosting vendor (OVH) a few minutes later and them claiming to have 24/7 support, nobody looked at our ticket until this morning when their phone support lines opened and I called them.
They’ve now replaced a defective power supply and we’re back online, after ~26 hours of being offline. Some pretty disappointing response times, to put it nicely.
We’re planning to move away from OVH at the end of this month, onto proper enterprise grade hardware that we own and control. This will give us a HUGE boost in server resources and allow us to scale for the foreseeable future, while also giving us the control to resolve problems like this much quicker. Expect another follow up post about this in the next couple weeks once I’ve put together the migration plan.
Timeline:
- Jan 5th 10:03am PST - We get alerts to the server being non-responsive.
- Jan 5th 10:05am PST - I pull up the console via IPMI and it’s completely non-responsive. Attempting to power off / on the server or do anything, does not work.
- Jan 5th 10:15am PST - Initial support ticket created with OVH. I followed up a couple times over the next few hours, and got no response.
- Jan 6th 6:32am PST - Called OVH, gave them the case number and asked them to investigate
- Jan 6th 7:34am PST - I get notified they’ll start their “intervention” in 15 minutes.
- Jan 6th 11:04am PST - Call them again, the tech is still working on it and they’ll get back to me with an update
- Jan 6th 11:34am PST - “I was informed by our data centre technician that there is an issue with the power supply unit for the rack on which your server resides. Your server will come back online once they have replaced the power supply.”
- Jan 6th 12:17pm PST - We’re back up finally!
Edit on Jan 7th @ 8:40am PST: We just had another outage of about an hour. Investigating with OVH.
Thank you for handling the issue :)
I can’t count how many times I opened my Lemmy.ca bookmark out of habit during the outage 😬
I kept thinking “I wonder how the Lemmy.ca outage is doing. I should get on and find ou-- oh yeah”
In case your unaware: https://status.lemmy.ca/ has the server status and updates on outages.
Yeah I did a search for “is lemmy.ca down” and it listed that site. The updates were good, but I really wanted a board where everyone could complain and speculate.
Same here … I opened up my bookmark about a dozen times before I realized I should switch to my alt lemmy account.
It’s also made me realize that I should maintain an extra or a couple extra lemmy accounts for times like these.
Yes you should! I was in a bit of a back and forth with someone and had to switch to my alt to continue (once I realized there was no ETA on the server getting fixed lol)