Are You Being Served?

The bumpy server ride over the weekend seems to have smoothed out.

Here's an update. I've set up hosting (with RAID 5 mirroring and NAS backups, thank you) at Softlayer and am in the process of moving all the servers over. I'll keep the current status updated here and at Leoville.com.

As of now here's what's happening:

• Leoville.com - moved but down due to hardware issues all day Wednesday. Now up and reliable (crossing fingers)
• Leoville.tv - move completed
• Leo.am - up and working fine, all netcast feeds are now good
• Leoville Town Square - back up, a few things are missing like PHP thumbnail resizing, and the old UBB board archive. I’ll get these back online as soon as I can
• TWiT.tv - move completed, there were some issues this morning, but moving .htaccess and fixing a MySQL naming error corrected them. Everything seems to be working fine. If you notice any lingering problems email me. Thanks for your patience during this move.

Since the server moves require IP address changes some sites may not work until your particular DNS server registers the change. This will go more smoothly with the TWiT and Leoville.com moves since the old sites will remain up until all all DNS records have changed over. With any luck you won't notice the move at all.

The .am registrar has updated the address for leo.am but as of this morning it hasn't propagated to the rest of the world. Since the netcast feeds go through leo.am they’re also down until the change propagates. That shouldn't be too long now. Meanwhile all new netcasts are available at TWiT.tv - I've posted at least eight new shows since the feeds failed including a new TWiT. Once the feed goes back up you'll see a lot of downloading - you might want to check to make sure you get all the back shows, however. iTunes and other netcast clients may only download the most recent show.

You may be wondering why I do all this myself instead of using a managed host, or paying a sysop. Because it's so much fun, of course!

My friend, Dane Golden, has started a behind the scenes blog here at http://twit.vox.com, including audio of me tearing my hair out - nice that he's had something to write about this weekend!

Thanks to the dozens of people who offered moral support, hosting, and technical advice. It's nice to have so many friends.

Friday the 13th Sever Woes

I'm no triskaidekaphobe but I'm starting to be a believer. A hard drive on one of my servers died this morning. As a result leo.am, leoville.tv, and Leoville Town Square are down. So are all the podcast feeds (they live on leoville.tv but I'm moving them to cachefly as soon as I can).

The good news is that I have complete and up-to-date backups, so no data has been lost. The bad news is that my hosting company, The Planet, (nudge, nudge) is taking its own sweet time fixing the problem. (So far it's been six hours without a response. I will be looking for a new hosting company.)

TWiT.tv, the TWiT forums, and leoville.com are unaffected. I'm hoping all the other sites will be up and running soon.

The podcast feeds are also locked - you can read them but the filesystem is read-only so I can't add to them. There are new episodes of the Daily Giz Wiz, Windows Weekly, FLOSS Weekly, and The Laporte Report in the queue. I'll post them on TWiT.tv and update the feeds as soon as I am able.

Thanks for your patience.

UPDATE: The Planet finally got a new drive in and the OS loaded a mere 12 hours after the initial failure. I'm out of town (fortunately the TravelLodge has good Internet access) so it's a little tricky getting everything restored, especially since WHM won't let me in. Once they fix this CPanel license problem I'll get things back up. Everything should be back sometime today. I hope.

I've received some good recommendations for hosting, but I'm still shopping around. I'm looking for three dedicated servers - we currently spend $1000/month for three dual Xeon boxes with 2TB/month each and 100Mbps pipes. If some high reliability, service oriented hosting company would like to be the new home of TWiT please email me. Thanks!

If You Can Read This You're Home

I'm in the process of transferring all my domains to new servers. Leoville.com and thisWEEKinTECH.com will share a server on The Planet. Leovilletownsquare.com will have its own server, also on the Planet. Leoville.tv and Leo.am - the radio show wiki - will be hosted by a new sponsor on the show. I'll tell you about that soon. And DSLExtreme has kindly agreed to host all the podcast downloads for KFI and TLR. If you're reading this the new DNS has propagated and you're looking at the new server!