Our servers are back up!
Earlier today (about 12 hours before this story), our site had a server crash. Early attempts to restart things (bouncing fluorine and hydrogen) were unsuccessful. (Thanks chromas and janrinok for your efforts!)
Fortunately, the system is usually lightly-loaded at this time, so relatively few people were affected.
Then mechanicjay came on the scene and was able to restart helium and neon. Then the rest of the servers for the site successfully came on-line.
Through it all, we retained access to IRC (thanks Deucalion!) and e-mail (thanks audioguy!).
There may be some lingering hiccups as slashd (which handles scheduled tasks -- think cron) plods through those tasks in due time.
We thank you for your patience during this time and send our thanks to all who notified us (politely!) about the outage on IRC and through e-mails.
Please join me in thanking all those who lent a hand through this period! You ROCK! =)
We return you to your regularly-scheduled stories.
--martyb
(Score: 3, Insightful) by martyb on Sunday February 13 2022, @04:14AM (2 children)
To my knowledge, it just "happened". I'm told there was no "smoking gun" in the log files. When I started here, the code was lacking in formal, rigorous testing. I've personally detected and reported well over 200 bugs. I'd not be surprised if there were more bugs lurking out there.
As you may recall, in the early days of the site, uptime was measured in hours. I think we're doing pretty well, all-in-all.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday February 13 2022, @10:00AM (1 child)
Hats off to anyone brave and audacious enough to maintain anything written in Perl :-)
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by martyb on Sunday February 13 2022, @02:54PM
Agreed, but I found it was not all THAT difficult.
I had some self-taught Perl knowledge before joining the site -- from about 20 years ago. I struggle with the single-character syntax forms for referencing things like pointers, arrays, and the like. The code is well-enough designed and organized that I can generally follow the intent. I have actually coded a few small enhancement, too!
All it took was some interest and curiosity!
Wit is intellect, dancing.