[wx-dev] forum offline?

[Bryan Petty]

On Sun, Jun 1, 2008 at 9:52 PM, Bryan Petty <bryan at ibaku.net> wrote:
> This is just a guess, but it's very possible that the forums are
> offline because a fire causing an explosion at The Planet datacenter.
> They have reported that no servers were damaged, but they don't have
> power, so it may be offline for a while.
>
> http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7011131199
>
> The forums are hosted in that datacenter. Coincidentally, both the
> online manuals and the wxWiki are also hosted at the same datacenter,
> but with a different hosting provider, so it looks like we lucked out
> that those aren't offline as well.

Quick Update:

Based on the behavior of the downtime on the forums (and the internet
route to them), I think I can safely say that the forums are hosted at
The Planet's Houston data center (H1) in Phase 1 (the first floor).
The first level, containing 3,000 servers, is where the electrical
equipment room that caught fire is located. They were able to bring
the second floor back online within about 32 hours of the explosion
powered on their own onsite generator, but the temporary generator
delivered to power the first floor failed after a few hours of service
(some users on the forums have confirmed this outage around the same
time) and a second generator was needed to bring power back up again.

If the forums are in fact on a server in Phase 1 and not in Phase 2,
we will see approximately 4-6 hours of downtime either on the 7th or
the 14th at midnight (CDT I think) when they switch power back to the
replacement battery backup system. The owner of the server hosting the
forums (Jason) has not been heard from since this started, so we won't
know until he knows (he may not know himself if Idaho Web Hoster
hasn't said). It's still possible that the second outage was caused by
other DNS or network issues which H1 has been resolving while bringing
up power to each floor, in which case, it's still possible that the
forums are in Phase 2 which won't experience that 4-6 hours of
downtime.

Regards,
Bryan Petty