Sir-Toby.Com

Hi,

Well, NEQ is back again but I was wondering just *why* it keeps going back down?

MSG wrote:Well, NEQ is back again but I was wondering just *why* it keeps going back down?

Portland has been experiencing a heat wave this past week. The friend who is hosting my server doesn't have any air conditioning. When the temperature in his place reaches 85 degrees Farenheit or so, the Sir-Toby.Com server crashes. This tends to happen around 5 PM, local time (GMT -7 hours). There is not much I can do in this situation. I monitor the server and have my friend shut if off when it appears to crash. When the room has cooled down a bit, he turns it back on.

The weather in Portland will be cooler for this week, so the server should remain up consistently for this week. My move process is nearly complete (the movers arrive with my furniture tomorrow). I am currently trying to arrange appropriate DSL service for my new place. Once that's in place, I will move the Sir-Toby.Com server into my new place. I *do* have air conditioning there, so the server should not have any problems with overheating.

So the recent overnight (US time) outages of the server havem't been caused by overheating in hot summer weather then?

I saw an outage during the day yesterday (my local time) that I thought might have been heat related, but then the server came back online by itself a few hours later. I've found that when the server crashes due to overheating, the only thing that can fix it is to turn it off, wait a while, and turn it back on again. Since I currently have an uptime of over 73 days for the Sir-Toby.Com server, I don't think the server has been overheating lately.

So, something else must be causing the outages. I just checked the system status of my DSL provider, Easystreet, to see if they have reported any network outages lately. The last outage that might have affected me was in April, according to them. They do have a maintenance window on Tuesday night / Wednesday morning, where outages can also occur. However, they generally inform me of any activity that will occur during the maintence window that will affect me, and they haven't mentioned anything to me lately.

Long story short, I really have no idea what is causing these outages. Until I saw your message, I wasn't aware that there were outages occuring during the night. If this persits, it seems I should arrange a monitoring system with a friend to send me a text message on my cell phone when there is a problem so that I can try to see what is happening, when it is happening.

Please let me know of any additional outages you experience. That will help me determine how serious the problem is, and perhaps point out a pattern that may indicate what the problem is.

Will do. What has been happening is that the server has not been responding to requests for pages even though it has remained pingable. This has lasted for several hours during both of the last two nights (your time - morning into early afternoon here in the UK).

Hmm... That is exactly what I experienced yesterday afternoon. I'm not exactly certain what that condition means. You see, my server sits behind a router. It is actually the router that is responding to the ping requests. If you are able to ping www.sir-toby.com, but the web site isn't responding, that generally means that the server has crashed. However, I'm not seeing any indication that the server crashed yesterday. This is why I am so confused. As I said earlier, I'll have to arrange to be notified when this occurs so that I can physically check the server and see what is going wrong. I'll ask a friend of mine today to see if he can set up such a monitoring system for me.

A friend of mine has set up a monitoring service for Sir-Toby.Com so that I will now be notified via text message on my cell phone when Sir-Toby.Com goes down. This should hopefully give me an opportunity to see what is going wrong and fix the problem. I will let you know what I find.

You are too kind, Sir Toby. Speaking for myself, I really appreciate the way you maintain this site. You go above and beyond.

Lost Soldier (Ib) wrote:You are too kind, Sir Toby. Speaking for myself, I really appreciate the way you maintain this site. You go above and beyond.

Well, truth be told, I do use the server for work and a few other personal projects as well, so I have several pretty good reasons to try to keep it up and running beyond Extend-A-Story. However, I am glad to be able to give back to the internet community. I feel we need more mom and pop sites like mine that aren't run by corporate behemoths. Sir-Toby.Com is just my way of trying to contribute to that goal.

Well, the monitoring system worked as expected. It woke me up at 3 AM this morning to inform me that my site was down. I investigated and found that my DSL modem is misbehaving during these down times for whatever reason. Nothing I could do seemed to fix the problem, so my ISP is going to ship out a new modem in the next day or so. Hopefully a new DSL modem will solve whatever problem I am having. I'll keep people posted on what happens when I get the new modem.

In the meantime...

ZZzzzz........

It seems as if these recent problems may be heat related. I just got woken up again this morning to another page saying that the web site is down. Just for kicks, I checked out the temperature of the room and saw that it was in the 65 degrees Farenheit range. I turned off the AC, turned on the heat, took a shower, and when I came back, I found everything working again.

This theory seems to correspond well with the outages normally occuring in the middle of the night for me. I normally turn the AC pretty cold at night, since the AC unit is pretty screwed up, and the room gets too warm if I don't turn it to its coldest setting. However, this also means that my room can get pretty cold sometimes.

However, I've been doing this with the AC for a while now. The DSL modem just started giving me problems. Something tells me that 65 degrees Farenheit shouldn't be too cold for equipment to function, so I'm still going to replace the modem and see if that helps.

There was a rather long outage last night. Yesterday was a particularly hot day, and so the AC ran all night trying to cool my apartment down. Sir-Toby.Com was down for several hours as a result of this. I turned my cell phone on silent mode so I could get some sleep last night, and so I didn't notice the outage until I woke up.

The DSL modem seems to be getting worse. My new modem should arrive today and I'll install it late tonight. Hopefully that will solve the problem. I'll keep everyone posted on what happens.

ARGH!!!!

Well, I got my new DSL modem today.

Somehow they didn't think that including the appropriate AC adapter would be important. Too bad the AC adapter for the old DSL modem doesn't fit the new DSL modem.

I'm currently on the phone with customer support AGAIN, after waiting on hold for over half an hour. They've agreed that yes, the AC adapter is important. They will of course be shipping me yet another DSL modem, and tell me that this one will indeed include the AC adapter.

Of course, this new DSL modem will not arrive until Monday.

*sigh*

My existing DSL modem seems to be getting worse and worse. In fact, it is acting up right now, and my apartment is rather warm right now. I wouldn't be surprised if Sir-Toby.Com is down until Monday because of this. Which of course means none of you will even see this message until everything is fixed.

I'm not sure if there is anything I can do at this point.

See you all on Monday I guess.

I hate Qwest.

Well, lucky me. The DSL modem started working again. Well, that at least gives me some hope that Sir-Toby.Com won't be totally gone until Monday.

It would appear that laying a piece of clothing on top of the DSL modem has managed to help it keep warm. I didn't suffer an outage last night. Hopefully that little trick (suggested to me by a friend) will keep Sir-Toby.Com up through the weekend.