Brief maintenance Tuesday night (PDT)

[mark]

One of our servers suffered a hard drive failure a few days ago. Normally this doesn't matter and you'd never notice, but this happens to be our currently active load balancer. This is the machine that all of our traffic goes through.

We need to do a failover to the secondary load balancer, but doing that will cause the site to blip for a minute or two while things cycle and get back up to speed. But since this is a non-routine maintenance (we don't do failovers very often, this will be the first one in 2010) I am scheduling a maintenance window just in case things go sour. :-)

The window is scheduled for 9:00 PM (PDT) on Tuesday, August 31st, 2010. This is 0400 UTC on Wednesday morning for those of you who use a more civilized way of thinking about time.

As always, we will update this community and Twitter with updates as we go. Thanks!

Comments

[cesy]

Thanks for letting us know!

[jumpuphigh]

Thank you for the advance notice. It's very helpful.

[blnchflr]

We Europeans (who don't stay up all night) always get the good end of the deal of maintenance stuff \o/

Best of luck with it, thanks for taking so good care of our traffic :o) !!

[msilverstar]

Thanks for the warning.

(technically, that's PDT)

[mark]

Thanks for the catch -- you're right, my brain was confused.

[turlough]

Thanks for letting us know and good luck!

[vanessagalore]

Do you mind if I use the text of this post as the basis of techno-geek-speak in a fic? It's awesomely tech-y.

"She canna take much more of this, Cap'n."

[mark]

Go for it.

[meredyth]

Dear Mark - thanks for the heads up - hope the maintenance goes well.

I just wanted to take this opportunity to say, if DW are remotely considering following in LJ's footsteps with regards this new Facebook/Twitter crossposting thing?

PLEASE DON'T.

You guys do a rocking job, and with luck this latest major fail over there will bring more people over to DW.

Cheers, Mere

[mark]

I haven't heard about the LJ fail, but I've always wanted us to have FB/Twitter integration (for people who want that). It makes me really sad that DW doesn't have that.

[meredyth]

While the details are still unclear, it appears that LJ have enabled it in such a way that it may possible to crosspost content from other people's locked communities and journals. And they have not offered users an option to disable it on their own journals, to prevent others from crossposting content.

I'm sure there are a lot of people who use other forms of social media, but choice is important, and so is privacy. Many of us want to be able to keep our blogs and communities separate from RL social networking - for many reasons.

And then there are people like myself who don't use those services who would prefer not to have them thrust upon us. :D

[sophie]

To bring you up to speed, it's a new feature that was rolled out today. The idea is you can crosspost your entries and your comments to Twitter and/or Facebook. But as well as what meredyth says, they've also put two new checkboxes on the Quick Repply box and the reply page for them, right between the main text box and the Post Comment button, so you can't just use Tab-Space or Tab-Return to post like you might be used to.

[ekmisao]

here sir: http://news.livejournal.com/129190.html (and read the THOUSANDS of angry comments)

[ekmisao]

The part that scared me if that people can login to LJ using the FB login password, thus opening LJ posts in all levels to reading and comments from FB accounts. LIke openID, but scarier.

[sophie]

I think most of the people who would have gone to DW are probably over here right now, to be honest. There have been so many fails that it's hard to imagine why people would want to stay except for other people being there, but apparently some people do actually like it.

[meredyth]

It's hard to pick up entire social groups and move them - especially when there's communities involved as well, so I can see why it's been hard for people to migrate when their interests are so entrenched and diversified at LJ - after all, it was there first. I know it's been hard for me, for all good intentions. I think DW are doing a wonderful job of trying to create a 'better' version of that style of blog, and I commend them for it.

However, aside from the FB/T fail (which LJ are getting nicely hammered over on the announcement post right now) - I've heard that they've also, without warning, disabled the '/' symbol in tags. Given that most fandom journals and communities use that symbol for character listings for nearly all their posts - well, you can imagine the angst right now.

As one commenter said 'if I were a conspiracy theorist ...' *g*

I'll just keep offering encouragement and invite codes - maybe the movement will finally get the kick start it needed. Or maybe LJ will do one of its famous backflips, say sorry a lot, offer some free gizmo, and ennui and habit will rule. Who knows? :D

[sophie]

I've heard that they've also, without warning, disabled the '/' symbol in tags.

Oh, so that's what was meant when I heard someone say "Slash doesn't work anymore." I didn't understand that; thanks for explaining it.

But yeah, if it's true, that's really rather stupid of LJ. Honestly, they don't know their userbase at all.