Downtime Sunday

Grrrr. Sunday morning at 9:36am the site went down, and it has remained down until about 3 minutes ago.

I'm working to find out what happened - sorry for the inconvenience.

dave

YEAH!!!!! We are back!!!!!! missed ya all

oh thank heavens, I was afraid I was going to have to go all day without dg again!! thank you dave, I know this must be getting to you worse than us!!

Thanks Dave!! Knew you were working on it and probably pulling your hair out trying to fix it. You just saved me from doing something drastic like cleaning house. LOL

I will say that I did get quite a few things done around here that needed doing. I missed being able to log on, but it was a good reminder of just where I spend my time. :) It's not on dishes. :)

Don't know how much I miss this place until it's gone! Good to have you all back..
You are the greatest Dave!

Oh thank you so much Dave....I was really have DG withdrawal...We appreciate all your hard work and all that you do!

I did get alot more done, weeding, watering, planting than if I were in front of PC w/DG. Missed it though!

Yeah!!!!! What a relief, I'm so glad the site up, thanks Dave....I'll bet your relieved too!!! I thought it was my computer and I learned more than I ever wanted to know about my computer last night!!!
Thanks again Dave
Becky

Boy dave, now you know what us windows users feel like on an almost daily basis. LOL

Whew.........thanks a bunch......was getting mucho worried when your email bounced, too!! I weeded and transplanted alot.......so I guess it was a good thing as well as a bad thing!

"eyes"

I can't believe how much time I have been spending on here, until it is off for a day! Sure missed it! I even did some work around the house, almost killed me!

I know how you all feel. I have davesgarden set as my home page. The Internet is just not the same without it. I found myself bored on the web without my second home here.

Gosh Dave, withdrawal is a terrible thing and yesterday was not a pretty picture here. So glad we are family again. Hope your problems with the server aren't something serious, but at least I'm getting my FIX right now. So glad we are all able to get back to our favorite hobby.....Davesgarden.com

Shirley

I got a good nap yesterday, but I would rather have been "gardening by computer" LOL Sounds like everyone else was more virtuous than I, and did a lot of things they had been meaning to. Me too!

I've pretty thoroughly investigated the downtime yesterday and have concluded with 100% certainty that there was no intruder in the system.

I am not satisfied, however, that the server was attacked by a "Denial of Service" attack, which doesn't actually hurt the site, except it makes it go offline. These attacks are rare and hard to pull off. I can't rule it out, but because of the rarity of this kind of event, and the fact that there are no known security problems with any of the services I am running, I believe that this is unlikely.

My conclusion is that I am 80% sure that I have a bug in one of my scripts here. The bug must cause some kind of infinite loop that is using a lot of memory, CPU, and disk access time. This is rendering the system unusable. The code is probably in a script on one of the web pages of Dave's Garden (or one of the network sites like the PDB or GWD).

If indeed this is the error, we can be fairly certain that yesterday's downtime was no the last one we will experience. I predict another downtime within the next 30 days.

The good news, however, is that the downtime shouldn't last as long as it did yesterday, as I wrote a new watchdog daemon to keep an eye on the system. My script logs every single piece of information it can, every 60 seconds. The script also checks the load on the system, and, if the load is too high, it automatically reboots it for me. The script is running with the highest priority, so it should continue to operate even if the load is too high.

The next time the system crashes, I will have the full logs so I can investigate much more in-depth into the state of the system at the moment of the crash.

So, there's the full explanation. :)

dave

Good debugging plan Dave. Let's hope your prediction that it will happen again in 30 days is off-base by about 666,000 days LOL.

Kathy

Glad to be hear again! Missed
all of you folks!

I tried all day to access the site; figured somthing was up.
Glad you got it fixed Dave
Thanks

Glad we are all back online and thanks for the heads up Dave that it may happen again. With your knowledge and expertise I am sure your backup plant will be effective. I had been out of town and returned while it was down, so had a lot of opportunity to unpack and work in the yard. Guess it is your way of putting us all back to work for a short while!!! Thanks!!!

but! If your perdictions are correct...then it already happened 2 tiems in 30. It happened that other morning. Or when ever that was . just for a little bit. And then. the big huge 24 hour one. So, maybe the curse is lifted.

Ps. So. no letter today then too. correct?

Right, no newsletter. There was so little activity yesterday, there was hardly enough news to generate a newsletter, so I let it go. There will be a newsletter tonight, however!

dave

I firgure with no one on. no letter. but. Ya never know. Bet you are so glad to be up adn running.

Sure am. It's gone real smooth today, and we're had good traffic. Time will tell if things are completely stable.

Good traffic today, huh? Well, we're all getting our fix again!

I just got in and everyone is here.
Dave Thanks for everything and good luck on your detective work protecting the site.
And yes, it seems that I'm an addicted too !!!!!!!!!!