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: 2) by janrinok on Sunday February 13 2022, @08:51AM (3 children)
Correct.
When you have a sys-admin available many problems become trivial. However, both of ours were fast asleep as it was nighttime in their part of the world. They have lives, jobs, families just like the rest of us and we do not expect 24 hour coverage from them. They are volunteers.
Access to the servers is, quite correctly, very restricted and though there are some limited actions that other staff can take to rectify some faults in this case the necessary action required a sys-admin. When mechanicjay got our message he reacted immediately. He quickly diagnosed the problem and recovered the system.
Many problems are elementary when one knows what one is doing. Fortunately, mechanincjay does!
When us amateurs start poking things with a long stick it usually doesn't help them very much. We now have to work out WHY the problem occurred in the first place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 13 2022, @09:04AM
Right, Ari!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pTamok on Sunday February 13 2022, @12:02PM
It looks like SoylentNews managed to let a chaos monkey [gremlin.com] loose.
(Score: 1) by istartedi on Sunday February 13 2022, @08:27PM
With all due respect, WhoooOOSH!
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