Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

I recently wrote a post about how fast my site runs only to have it fall on my face this morning. Having used crap 1and1 and switched to Cari.net about a year ago, I have experienced 100% uptime from them. Except for occasions when I piped random garbage into iptables or ran chgroup recursively on important operating system files, the server has been consistently up and working at a high level of performance.

This morning it went down for approximately four hours. A Cari.net support tech issued the following statement:

This morning the C2 dedicated hosting facility here at Cari.net suffered a series of power events caused by a loss of main power from SDGE. During this time, feed lines which connect our facilities to our primary generator fused and were rendered non-functional.

The UPS systems provided the 20 minutes of protection as designed, but repairs were not able to be to be made within that short protected window. Power systems were unstable as repairs were made. As of this moment, we believe we have rectified the issues and we do not anticipate any further issues.

Interestingly, a very alert reader sent in the following:

I’m looking for a good dedicated machine hosting service and saw your recent plug for cari.net. I ended up setting pingdom to monitor your site as a result so I could see how fast and reliable cari.net hosting is. Last night your site was up and down for about four hours – was that you, or unreliability on the part of cari.net? Do you have any records as to the reliability and/or performance of their hosting?

I have to say that the power failure today seems catastrophic and unexpected, and that they did an excellent job of keeping us informed and fixing the problem. Even though their yearly SLA is no longer the advertised 99.999% (1 - 4/8765.81277 = 99.9544%), I am still a satisfied customer. Compare to Dreamhost, who admit on their blog that they had 95.0838% uptime in February and keep a running list of shame.

Stick with professional, dedicated hosting. Everyone lies about their SLA is the first rule when choosing a webhost. You get what you pay for is the second.

Hi, my Firefox (the latest public version 2.0.0.1) is leaking memory. I know that you think you’ve heard this before and that it’s extensions, or old version, but seriously this has to stop:

Fixed! Removing the Firebug extension completely solves the problem. I don’t know why Firebug leaks memory, but trust me, it does.

Yup, it’s using 623MB of memory. Opening a new tab is visibly sluggish. Closing a tab, clicking on links–every action takes seconds to perform on my Core Duo 2 6600 processor with 4 GB of RAM. Extensions? I’m running two: Firebug and an S3 attachment:

The secret Firefox memory cache page (about:cache) returns nothing out of the ordinary:

Number of entries: 1114
Maximum storage size: 28672 KiB
Storage in use: 75316 KiB
Inactive storage: 0 KiB

I have no idea what’s causing this behavior, so I’m going to ask for help. Digg this and let the world know Firefox *still* has memory management issues.

Netcraft has a great story about Amazon downtime. For what looks like roughly a day, their Alexa portal experienced extremely high latencies. Perhaps we should give them a new logo to represent their downsides:

I’ve always been against third-party web services solutions. What happens when they go down? It’s not a matter of if they go down, but rather when. No matter how many different locations you have, how many servers in your cluster, you will eventually experience a natural disaster, and lose connectivity. Until there’s some better way to maintain uptime, not prone to natural disaster, failure, or human error, you’re better off running your own systems.

Check out what I get when I ask where Myspace is:

nslookup myspace.com

Name: myspace.com
Addresses: 216.178.32.49, 216.178.32.50, 216.178.32.51, 127.0.0.1, 216.178.32.48

That’s right–the loopback address, essentially me, resolves to Myspace. They’ve clearly misconfigured their DNS, and are now dropping 1/5 of their global traffic. Smart one, News Corp. It’s not a great idea when you buy a company to make a public, stupid mistake. For more, see the opendns blog.

If you’ve ever played any Steam-powered game, you know that their distribution model requires a user-account which is licensed for whatever games you’ve bought from them. Their top games, according to rating, are Half-Life 2 (HL2), Half-Life (HL), Counter-Strike (CS), Counter-Strike: Source (CS:Source), Half-Life 2: Episode One, Darwinia, Day of Defeat: Source, SiN Episodes, and X2: The Threat. Apparently, though, account authorizations aren’t working properly, and their support page is dead in the water. When I signed in today to kill half an hour on CS:Source, I got the following error message:

“Disconnect: This Steam account does not own this game. Please login to the correct Steam account.”

Naturally I’d like to visit their Steam support page, but I get a timeout when I try to load the page:

In other words, Steam is telling me that I don’t own the rights to play the game I bought from them, and refusing to listen to me when I want to complain and let them know that I do. Sorry Steam, Valve, et al, you’re wrong. I really did buy that game:

Dear Elliott Back (Steam account name: exxxx),

Thank you for your recent purchase. Counter-Strike: Source is now available in your Steam “Games” window. To play, just double-click on the name of a game in this list.

Your credit card has been charged as detailed below. This email serves as your receipt.

Product Cost
———————————————–
Counter-Strike: Source $ 19.95

In their purchase email, they include steamsupport@support.steampowered.com as a support email address, so I’ll definitely be dropping a note. I’m not optimistic, though, since many other Steam or CS players are experiencing the same issues. Valve / Steam must have rolled out a new patch without thinking about how it would hammer their servers.