Tony

We will be updating the Mars server kernel to the latest version on Friday June 18th between 9:00am CDT and 12:00pm CDT. We estimate this will result in about 10 minutes of down time while the server reboots. Even though we're running Ksplice to minimize reboots we like to do an update every time there is a major operating system update. In this case CentOS 5.5 was released so we'd like to run the latest 5.5 kernel to get any non security related improvements which Ksplice does not do as it's strictly for security updates.


Date: 06/18/2010
Start time (CDT): 9:00am
End time (CDT): 12:00pm
Duration: 3 hours
Estimated Down Time: 10 minutes

On Monday July 2nd we will be performing the upgrade to cPanel 11 on all servers. We will be doing this throughout the day and do not expect any interruption of web server service. We do however expect periods of time where cPanel will be unavailable due to the upgrade. We have no exact estimate on how long this will take or an exact time each server will have the upgrade performed. If you have any questions about this do not hesitate to ask our support department.


Date: 5/21/2007
Start time (EDT): 10:00am
End time (EDT): 10:00pm
Duration: 12 hours (Estimated)

We will be removing Zend Framework from the PHP default include path on Tuesday October 6th. It was a great at the time to have for developers not wishing to upload the framework. Unfortunately as more applications make use of it there are problems that are starting to come up. One such popular example is Magento does not function properly without modifications to the .htaccess file.

This does not mean you cannot use Zend Framework on our hosting. You can still do this it's just you need to upload it to your account. This is probably better anyways as each version brings changes. So anytime we were upgrading it could have potentially broke your application anyways.

If you have any questions or concerns about this please contact support.

Date: Sunday, April 25th, 2010 (04/25/2010)
Start time: 12:00 AM CDT
End time: 7:00 AM CDT
Duration: 7 hours
Service Affected: Public Network
Reason: Network Migration
Location: All Datacenters

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As a continuation of the previous maintenance on April 24th, 2010 (04/24/2010), this new maintenance window will serve to migrate the public network between datacenters to the new MPLS enabled network. During this maintenance, traffic will be shifted to other providers while circuits terminating in Equinix or similar facilities are migrated to the new equipment.

POPS:

LAX - Los Angeles, CA
SJC - San Jose, CA
DEN - Denver, CO
CHI - Chicago, IL
ATL - Atlanta, GA
NYC - New York City, NY
MIA - Miami, FL

Datacenters:

DAL - Dallas, TX
SEA - Seattle, WA
WDC - Washington, DC

During this maintenance, customers can expect to see packetloss, routing reconvergence, and high latency as traffic is shifted to other providers. Datacenter will be migrating the following circuits during this maintenance.

DAL:
- Qwest
- Time Warner Cable
- Comcast
- Telefonica
- Google
- Equinix
- Public Peering to SEA/WDC

SEA:
- NTT America
- Level 3
- Global Crossing
- Time Warner Cable
- Comcast
- Seattle IX
- Google
- Public Peering to DAL/WDC

WDC:
- NTT America
- Level 3
- Global Crossing
- Qwest
- Time Warner Cable
- Comcast
- Equinix
- Public Peering to SEA/DAL
- Google

Again, during this maintenance, customers can expect to see packetloss, routing reconvergence, and high latency on the public network only. Datacenter Engineers will make every effort to mitigate the effects of this work during the timeframe listed above.

I'm just curious what video games everyone is playing right now.

For me right now I'm working my way through Batman Arkham Asylum (awesome game) and picked up Need For Speed Shift. Both are for my 360 although I do have a ps3 as well.

As far as PC games I play a game of Quake Live once in a while but that's about it.

So how about anyone else?

I'm just curious what video games everyone is playing right now.

For me right now I'm working my way through Batman Arkham Asylum (awesome game) and picked up Need For Speed Shift. Both are for my 360 although I do have a ps3 as well.

As far as PC games I play a game of Quake Live once in a while but that's about it.

So how about anyone else?

Here's May the final month of me posting this as we'll have public uptime available for the July posting.

Anyways here's the uptime reports for all our servers.

The file system check completed and the system is back online

On Wednesday November 21st starting at 9am pst we will be taking the sjc003 server down to run a file system check on one of the partitions the operating system is reporting to have issues. This is necessary maintenance as otherwise the problem could result in an unplanned outage and potential data loss if it's a file system check is not done within a reasonable timeframe. We've set aside a window of 3 hours meaning the window ends at 12pm pst. We estimate the actual file system check will take about an hour and a half to be completed. We scheduled the window based on the usage patterns of this system where during this window it sees significantly less traffic than the rest of the day.

Date: 11/20/2012
Start time (PST): 9:00am
End time (PST): 12:00pm
Duration: 3 hours
Estimated Down Time: 120 minutes

On Monday July 2nd we will be performing the upgrade to cPanel 11 on all servers. We will be doing this throughout the day and do not expect any interruption of web server service. We do however expect periods of time where cPanel will be unavailable due to the upgrade. We have no exact estimate on how long this will take or an exact time each server will have the upgrade performed. If you have any questions about this do not hesitate to ask our support department.


Date: 5/21/2007
Start time (EDT): 10:00am
End time (EDT): 10:00pm
Duration: 12 hours (Estimated)

We've just been notified one of the drives on the Yoda server has failed on January 9th 2011. We're going to swap out the failed drive as soon as possible and start a rebuild of the new drive. We'll update this post as soon as we have more information as far as when we're doing this.

We will be removing Zend Framework from the PHP default include path on Tuesday October 6th. It was a great at the time to have for developers not wishing to upload the framework. Unfortunately as more applications make use of it there are problems that are starting to come up. One such popular example is Magento does not function properly without modifications to the .htaccess file.

This does not mean you cannot use Zend Framework on our hosting. You can still do this it's just you need to upload it to your account. This is probably better anyways as each version brings changes. So anytime we were upgrading it could have potentially broke your application anyways.

If you have any questions or concerns about this please contact support.

On Saturday March 21st at 1:30pm we will be upgrading the Mars servers PHP to 5.2.9. We do not expect any down time during the maintenance window. We will be upgrading the system PHP to 5.2.9 first then the web servers so for a short time there may be different versions handling command line cronjobs. This should not affect anything but we figure it's worth noting.

If you have any questions about this maintenance window do not hesitate to contact support.

Date: 03/21/2008
Start time (EST): 1:30pm
End time (EST): 2:00pm
Estimated Down Time: None
Duration: 30 minutes

On Friday July 17th we will be upgrading the MySQL version of the Mars server to 5.0.81 from 5.0.77 between 12:30AM and 1:00AM CDT. We do not estimate that it'll take 30 minutes to do we will just be doing it during this window. We estimate there will be 1 minute of MySQL down time in order to restart the service to complete the upgrade. There may be none at all we're just giving an estimate that it could be 1 minute.

The reason for this upgrade is to stay on top of the latest versions available to us through cPanel.


Date: 07/17/2009
Start time (CDT): 12:30am
End time (CDT): 1:00am
Duration: 30 Minutes
Estimated Down Time: 1 Minute

Here's May the final month of me posting this as we'll have public uptime available for the July posting.

Anyways here's the uptime reports for all our servers.

On Thursday July 29th between 9:00am and 12:00pm CDT we will be upgrading the Mars server's PHP to the latest version. We do not expect any down time during the maintenance window. We will be upgrading the system PHP to the latest version first then the web servers so for a short time there may be different versions handling command line cron jobs. The reason for this upgrade is to get the latest version of PHP with all the latest fixes. Along with PHP we will also be upgrading the LSAPI version which will bring some performance benefits on the web server side.

If you have any questions about this maintenance window do not hesitate to contact support.

Date: 07/29/2010
Start time (CDT): 9:00am
End time (CDT): 12:00pm
Estimated Down Time: None
Duration: 3 hour

We will be updating the kernel on the Yoda VPS node to the latest version between 10:00pm and 2:00am EDT. The reason for this is for security reasons while we do use ksplice the age of the kernel and the time it takes to patch this system at this point makes sense to just update the kernel itself. Even if we had to patch the system the virtual machines on it would have had to be all taken off line in order to do the updates at this point. So we believe it would be wise to just do an actual kernel update.

The maintenance window is for 4 hours but we estimate the down time will only be 5 minutes for the node and between 20 and 30 minutes for all virtual machines to be up and running again.

Date: 09/21/2010 - 09/22/2010
Start time (EDT): 09/21/2010 10:00pm
End time (EDT): 09/21/2010 2:00am
Duration: 4 hours
Estimated Down Time: 5-30 minutes

This morning we experienced drive failure on the Gizmo server and also raid failure. After rebooting the machine we were able to bring it back online eventually. We were alerted to failed stripes on the raid array of Gizmo. This is not fixable and requires a complete rebuild of the raid array. Rather than rebuilding the array and restoring from backups we're going to migrate everyone to another node. We will be starting this as soon as possible and we'll update everyone as we move forward. You will not have any change of IP addresses or logins.

We hope to have everyone migrated before anything serious happens. But we have made another set of backups just in case the server is to fall offline before we migrate all VPS's off of it.

Date: 12/17/2008
Start time (EST): 2:45pm
End time (EST): Unknown
Estimated Down Time: Unknown
Duration: Unknown

This a topic dedicated to potential issues you could experience due to the migration over to LiteSpeed.

Our Mars server has come under a large distributed denial of service attack. We are currently working to filter this attack. Until we've successfully entirely filtered the attack at some points the server may be slower responding than usual.

On Thursday March 15th we will be replacing a failed drive on the Yoda server between 1am and 4am EDT. We do not expect any downtime to swap out the failed drive as the system is hot swap capable. Once the drive is replaced disk I/O may be slightly slower than usual while the drive rebuilds.

Date: 03/05/2012
Start time (EDT): 1:00am
End time (EDT): 4:00am
Estimated Down Time: 0 minutes

The Mars server kernel paniced and upon being rebooted is requiring a file system check. We estimate the check will take approximately 1 hour to complete.

Date: 10/04/2012
Start time (CDT): 1:15am
End time (CDT): 2:15am
Duration: 4 hours
Estimated Down Time: 60 minutes

The Mars server kernel paniced and upon being rebooted is requiring a file system check. We estimate the check will take approximately 1 hour to complete.

Date: 10/04/2012
Start time (CDT): 1:15am
End time (CDT): 2:15am
Duration: 4 hours
Estimated Down Time: 60 minutes

Our Mars server currently has a failed backup battery unit on the raid card. This unit is used to make sure data is still written to the drives if there were to be power failure of some kind. As a result of this we believe it would be best to replace the failed battery unit as soon as possible.

The maintenance window will be from 3:00 AM EST until 5:00 AM EST (GMT-6) on Wednesday June 25th. We do not expect it to take anymore than 20 minutes to replace the bad battery. During the 20 minute window of replacing the battery the server will be offline as it is a requirement to replace the battery unit. We are sorry about the short notice on the window, however this must be done and we rather not leave the raid card without a battery for more than 24 hours.

Date: 06/25/2008
Start time (EST): 3:00am
End time (EST): 5:00am
Duration: 2 hours
Expected Down Time: 20 minutes

Starting on Monday September 19th we will be migrating Mars shared hosting accounts over to a new shared hosting specific server dal006 with the hostname dal006.hawkhost.com. The reason for this is currently Mars is one of our mixed servers which over the course of 2011 we have been migrating mixed servers to strictly shared or reseller. The one major advantage is once migrated over shared hosting users will have access to the shared hosting specific features that are currently not available on our mixed servers. It also means no longer will reseller users be able to affect services with their user accounts. In this case it will also be a hardware upgrade moving from a Dual Xeon 5520 with 24gb ram and 4x300GB Raid-10 to a Dual Xeon X5670 with 24gb of memory and 4x600GB Raid-10.

Since all our IP addresses are routed to our VLAN's rather than a specific server we can make this migration very seamless. We will migrate data then re-route the IP address over to the new server. This dramatically reduces the chances of data sync issues which are usually associated with server moves due to IP addresses changing. That is not to say it cannot happen but we are available to assist with any issues users may run into if for whatever reason their data does go out of sync. As for any downtime associated with the migration we estimate it'll be about 1 minute at most as we need to remove the IP from the old server and route it to the new one which can take us about a minute.

How the migration will work is we will start migrating users on dedicated IP's first starting on Monday. After that is completed we will move onto users with shared IP addresses. We hope that this entire migration will only last two days we hope but we've created a window of three days.

The only thing to keep in mind is once migrated it is not advised to be connecting to the mars hostname if you currently are. While the data will stay there for now eventually all shared hosting user data will be removed from the Mars server as it will be fully converted to a reseller hosting only server. So make sure to connect to the dal006.hawkhost.com server once the window has been completed.

If you have any questions regarding the maintenance do not hesitate to contact us. Our system administration department is available to answer any questions regarding this.


Start Date: 09/19/2011
End Date: 09/21/2011
Estimated Down Time: less than 5 minutes
Duration: 3 days