16 Dec 10 ALERT: ALA Connect is down (now back up!)
Final update 5:
We’re thrilled to announce that after an intense day of work, ALA Connect is back online! We’ve done thorough testing and haven’t found any bugs or problems, and no data was lost. This also means the Conference Scheduler is live, and schedules that were already created should still be there.
If there’s any upside to this whole thing, it’s that the site is running on a more powerful server, so you should notice improved response times. Although we don’t anticipate any issues, please contact us immediately if you encounter any problems.
Thanks for your patience and support while we worked through this trying time.
Well, technically the server is going up and down, but we’re considering it down because access is not stable. We attempted a RAM upgrade last night to ensure the site’s stability leading up to and during Midwinter, but it seems to have had the opposite effect.
The hosting company is working to restore access, which includes a firmware update for the NIC card among other things. We hope to have access restored soon. At this point, we recommend that you not to try to use the site until we post an “all clear” message here and on Twitter so that you don’t lose any work.
Thanks for your patience.
Reader's Comments
Update: Apparently the problem is the NIC cards, which require a replacement of the whole chassis. The hosting company is in the process of finding a replacement chassis, so hopefully Connect will be back up later tonight.
Frustrated,
Jenny
Update 2: Bad news – they can’t replace the chassis as planned, so we have to move to a brand new server. This will require re-installing all of the Connect pieces over a fresh install of a new operating system, moving the databases, adding new holes in firewalls so services can talk to each other, etc.
It’s killing me to say this, but we’re likely looking at a few days of down time to get all of this done.
At this point, we’re waiting for the new server to be ready so that our programmers can begin the process. I’ll keep updating the situation here as we get more news and especially an ETA for the site to be back up.
Jenny
Update 3: The new server is in place, and we’re working on copy data off the old hard drives to the new ones. There’s still a lot of installation, configuration, and testing to do, but the good news is that the process is underway.
Update 4: The migration process is going well, better than we had hoped in fact. Some users may have received email notifications of new/updated content when email began working on the new server and queued messages from the old server went out.
I don’t want to jinx anything, but progress is looking good so far. More soon.