Planned load balancer failover shortly

[mark]

Hi all,

As part of our new hardware project, I'm going to be failing us over to our new load balancers. This will involve a brief downtime for the site while everything fails over, but it should be less than 60 seconds.

Thanks for your patience, and sorry for the interruption!

Comments

[crossover_chick]

I assume the site looking weird (the main pages loading, but without the special skin applied, more or less) is a result of this? Everything's still functional, it's just -- all in a column, if that makes any sense.

[sharpiefan]

Looks kinda... Web 1.0-ish? Plain white, everything on the left, hyperlinks in blue?

Yeah, I've got that, too. :(

[crossover_chick]

It did until I refreshed just now! Guessing it was just the failover (which is a REALLY weird name for that).

[sharpiefan]

...and now it's back to normal. Must've been that - and yes. It's a weird name!!

[thnidu]

I fairly much guessed what it meant, but a def or link would've helped. Here's Wikipedia's opener:

In computing, failover is switching to a redundant or standby computer server, system, hardware component or network upon the failure or abnormal termination of the previously active application, server, system, hardware component, or network. Failover and switchover are essentially the same operation, except that failover is automatic and usually operates without warning, while switchover requires human intervention.

[mark]

Thanks for the link!

In my parlance (and in the industry-speak I'm used to), a failover can be "manual" or "automatic". In the manual case, it's like the switchover that article talks about.

Sorry for not being more explicit about what I was doing! We have upgraded our load balancers (the machines that are the very front of the network, they receive user traffic and send it to web servers). Anyway, we had still been sending traffic to the old load balancers, so I had to do a manual failover to the new machines.

This also involved a major upgrade of software, which is why we had the static files failing to load for a bit. That got nailed down and resolved though, and everything looks fine now as best I can see!

[thnidu]

In my parlance (and in the industry-speak I'm used to),

This is what I meant. I'm a language researcher, and I know how easy it is for people who are used to talking with colleagues and co-workers to fall into using their shoptalk with people who* aren't *familiar with it, as well. It happens in every field, not excepting my own.

Thanks for the good work, and for the explanation.

Dr. Whom: Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoëpist, and Philological Busybody
Senior Linguist, Dragon Systems, Inc. (R.I.P.), 1990-1999 (2001)

[azurelunatic]

As a supplement to what mark has mentioned, that web 1.0 look is generally when the css files with the site skin fail to load (which can happen for other reasons besides swapping out the load balancers).

When it was happening on NaNoWriMo.org a lot, the phrase "the website has no pants" entered the collective vocabulary of some of my NaNo-ing friends. Hilarity ensued.

[sharpiefan]

"the website has no pants" - AWESOME!! :D

[mark]

Everything is working fine for me. Possibly you refreshed during the period we were failing over -- can you please do a hard refresh? (Hold down shift, click the reload button.)

[crossover_chick]

Yeah, it's fine now -- I guess it was during the failover period! Just caught me by surprise, is all. :)