MetaFilter Status Blog

DNS Woes

Our DNS provider is having some trouble right now. They're under DDOS attack and tweeting about it right now. What that means for MetaFilter is that some of our sites may become unreachable for a time. Right now our static server seems hardest hit, so there could be issues loading stylesheets, images, and scripts for the sites. We're looking at DNS hosting alternatives, and hoping easyDNS can work through these problems quickly.

All is good

The server move went well last night (thanks to full backups transfered earlier in the day and differential backups of just that day's activity), and DNS changes were made before midnight. The new server feels screaming fast, but the real test will be in a couple days as weekday traffic peaks begin to hit it, but so far this has been the smoothest server move to date.

We are currently down, doing maintenance

And our 10pm shutdown has started. We'll update this post as we get through the process, but we hope to be back within 2 hours.

• 10:00pm server brought down, all traffic redirected to down.metafilter.com
• 10:05pm backing up recent database changes
• 10:08pm db changes complete, transfering to new db server
• 10:16pm db transfer halfway done
• 10:28pm transfer complete, restoring database from backup in progress
• 10:41pm db restore nearly done
• 10:51pm new db server migration complete! Sites are back online!
• 10:55pm DNS has been moved to a new IP. Within 15min to a few hours, you should start hitting our new servers.
• 10:58pm Less than an hour total, yay! I'm calling this complete and closing this post up for good.

Downtime coming up this Saturday

We are planning on 1-2 hours of downtime this Saturday night, Dec 17th at 10pm Pacific. 

Server Updates

Time for server updates at 10:00 pm Pacific. We plan to be offline for 15 minutes. 

Update: We're back!

Maintenance Tonight

Guess what? Time for server updates at 10:00 pm Pacific. We plan to be offline for 15 minutes.

Update (10:10pm): We're back!

Maintenance Scheduled Tonight

Time for server updates at 10:00 pm Pacific. We plan to be offline for 10-15 minutes.

Update: Once again it looks like we'll need another 15-20 minutes.

Update (10:34pm): We're back!

Scheduled Maintenance Tonight

Same drill. Time for server updates at 10:00 pm Pacific. We'll be offline for 10-15 minutes.

Update (10:00pm): Looks like we'll be delayed by about 15-20 minutes or so.

Scheduled Maintenance Tonight

The MetaFilter servers will be offline for 15-20 minutes tonight for updates starting at 10pm Pacific. We'll keep you posted here if anything changes.

Quick Server Update

We're updating the servers at 10:00pm Pacific Time and should be back on the air within a few minutes.