Server reboot - Page 4

CML209 · 15 Aug 2004, 04:02 PM

My big problems with yahoo over the years was that if mail was sent during busy periods, even to/from another yahoo addy, that mail might be delayed for a couple days. I lost a few friends over things like apologies not getting there, or how about the silly time I wanted to kill myself. I sent that to a friend. Next day when I felt better about it, I sent another one. The order they were received was in reverse. And, though people may not recall, Yahoo would go down often too.
However, this is madness. If tonight was a rare occurance, several hours would be understandable. This just happens to be about the worst of a series.
CML

audelair · 15 Aug 2004, 04:02 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by CML209
Yahoo is not very reliable by my standards. FM 2003 was reliable. I'll be working on offline storage starting tomorrow, which means I have to give up time on the other projects I am working on.
I love the IMAP and the Identities. These very features were available last year when things were fine.
I have a few months left on my contract and will be moving having more of my contacts use the alternate addresses that I have already begun using again. In that time, which could be made longer by FM, if the service returns, I will consider keeping the service.
Sorry FM. You really need to work at customer care on this one. I know you're trying hard, but the cheering section that applauds when things finally get up and running is getting smaller.
CMLane

I used Yahoo for years and never experienced an outage for more than a couple of minutes. My experience with them was very very good, but i changed because I needed more storage so i shopped around (of course, Yahoo now has more than FM's paid service).

xlr9 · 15 Aug 2004, 04:03 PM

yeh I'm usually a pretty patient guy, but this is stupid! do any other world class email services have unplanned outages on a scale like this? [no]

i love FM and I appreciate you guys keeping us up to date, but this is just a big waste of my time

oysterquartz · 15 Aug 2004, 04:04 PM

Sorry, but this is ridiculous. Fastmail is the least reliable email and/or hosting company that I have ever used (and I've used quite a few in Europe and the USA). Eleven outages in a month is hardly "reliable".

What most infuriates me is that Fastmail is pitching storage as a way to host your own domain. This is pure nonsense! Why should my domain be inaccessible due to a problem with Fastmail's database???? Visit one of my domains (thankfully an unimportant one) and you receive the following message:

MessagingEngine.com down due to database outage

We are currently running a recovery on our database which is taking longer than expected.

UPDATE:At this point we hope to restore services at about US time 1am PDT or 4am EDT (click here to see this time in your timezone).

Also check the status blog for more updates.

Why wouldn't things be configured so that email is completely separate from web hosting, etc. Why does one problem totally tank the whole service? This is simply unacceptable.

If any other service had this level of (un) reliability, people would be making derisive remarks and telling them to switch to an Australian provider that they know of which is so fast and reliable

My whole morning in Athens is shot. Thankfully, I know better than to host business critical email at Fastmail.

bsp75088 · 15 Aug 2004, 04:05 PM

Well...although the webmail portion of my ISP's e-mail system is less than spectacular, guess that's where my important mail should go. I need access to my e-mail from at least 4 locations so webmail is the only way to go for me. Probably shouldn't change ISP's for a while LOL.

xlr9 · 15 Aug 2004, 04:05 PM

maybe FM needs more tech staff to prevent problems like this. what is the users:staff ratio for fastmail?? about 200,000:1...? Is that normal?

rubberduck · 15 Aug 2004, 04:07 PM

I have paid for this service. I don't care if I get 150 MB or 2 GB storage, I use only 5 MB of it anyway. I first signed up at Fastmail because I wanted a reliable e-mail service, and yes it was...

I hope we get compensated for this HUGE outgage!

The only positive is that I have my own domain, so a move to another service is easy, I don't have to change e-mail address.

bsp75088 · 15 Aug 2004, 04:08 PM

Yea, I put my personal website on fastmail. Today I put a picture of me on there....maybe THAT'S where the outage came from.

severach · 15 Aug 2004, 04:08 PM

Quote:

Edit: I just saw severach's post, good stuff (But in regards to mentioning "catchall" and such -- just to clarify I'm not using email forwarding)

I try to quit modifying when other posts follow to keep the responses from getting too mixed up.

If you only have a couple aliases on your FM domain then Yahoo's 5 email accounts are no problem. I'm already working on 30 and plan on more, so that's 25 aliases for which there can be no corresponding Yahoo accounts. Remember, FM creates aliases in your domain. Yahoo creates accounts like a hosting or business service would. Yahoo isn't too keen on giving out 50 100MB accounts just because we ask nicely and there appears to be no option to buy.

The only way this could work is if you bought Yahoo plus, and named your FM own domain aliases in such a way that they exactly correspond to your available 500 Yahoo aliases.

The clash is in the different things that Yahoo and FM are providing and a single yahoo catchall account would solve the problem.

Quote:

It was a judgement call (instead of inserting in between "smtp.us" and "smtp.us2").

No, I don't think it was a judgement call. Jeremy already said his backup SMTP was working so if you didn't do that then he would be getting them on a server that you can't browse, not your other service. It's not like the sender sprays the message at all the backup servers when the primary fails. It may have been a judgement call at the time but now we can see that it is the only way that will work. If the first SMTP server is the only one you can browse, than you want mail elsewhere if it can't get to that one.

Quote:

Edit: Oh I just realized, sorry for getting Jeremy's outage announcement thread sidetracked off-topic, I apologize

Unfortunately, I don't think that planning for outages is off topic in an outage thread though it may deserve a title of it's own someday.

I can't post Yahoo links because they have all been changed in the last 2 days. Does this smack of a service change coming?

CML209 · 15 Aug 2004, 04:09 PM

"My whole morning in Athens is shot. Thankfully, I know better than to host business critical email at Fastmail."

Is FM listening?

FMRocks · 15 Aug 2004, 04:11 PM

Something about the blog: The times there need to be fixed, since they are being touted as PDT. The last update says 06:16:17 PDT, and as of the time of this post, we are nowhere near 06:16:17 PDT.

kander · 15 Aug 2004, 04:12 PM

xlr: Please explain how more technical staff would prevent/help with such issues? Servers need to be patched to provide stable service (these kernel patches I believe are used to fix a longgoing stability issue where 'processes got stuck'.. technical story, very simply put the server couldn't close a particular program, but on a far more complicated scale then on a desktop computer), so it had to be applied. The database server got.. icky after that patch was applied... nothing humans could predict/prevent in that. The database is now being rebuilt. The computer is now 'crunching numbers', so to speak, and apart from the theoretical additional speed to be gained from a higher morale because there are 200 staffmembers cheering for it every time it completes a megabyte of data there's nothing more people around it can do to make it go faster, I'm afraid.

Personally I'd be more happy with more or less the same amount of TechStaffers, but more servers and more balancing... it sounds to me like this database server is a very Single Point Of Failure..

--K

audelair · 15 Aug 2004, 04:15 PM

Without reliability, how can FM survive? It already loses in storage and pricing and bandwidth. Not to be too blunt, but at this point, I feel like a total sucker.

bitequator · 15 Aug 2004, 04:16 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by kander
Hrm... the irony. My own-domain mail is safe at all times, due to a similar double-redundancy system... but I hardly use my own domain for mailing and rely on my FM aliases. I know, stupid move, but my domain ain't pretty...

Hey, I think kander is a great name

rakhesh, others also like to just have an email forwarder handle the MX for their domain (like ZoneEdit) and have it forward two copies of each received email (one to FM, one to a backup account). I think it could be a good solution depending on your needs (especially if the backup account has an auto-purge/auto-aging capability).

What's ironic (besides kander's situation), I'm also now having FM forward a copy of all received non-spam messages to a few of my newer accounts such as Exchange, Gmail, etc. But this isn't a real solution for backup redundancy since the forwarding is done by FM Sieve (which obviously won't happen if FM is down haha). It's more so I can test the other accounts with valid emails. I'm also doing this for all my family members...

memac · 15 Aug 2004, 04:18 PM

Ehh, why was a new thread opened for this when one already exists? Doesn't make sense to me. I'd rather see the FM staff working on resolving the issue than continually checking this forum seeing people's complaints. They know the service is down already and that people are upset. Starting new threads to add more complaints won't get the problem resolved any faster.

15 Aug 2004, 04:02 PM	#46
CML209 Essential Contributor Join Date: Feb 2004 Posts: 328	My big problems with yahoo over the years was that if mail was sent during busy periods, even to/from another yahoo addy, that mail might be delayed for a couple days. I lost a few friends over things like apologies not getting there, or how about the silly time I wanted to kill myself. I sent that to a friend. Next day when I felt better about it, I sent another one. The order they were received was in reverse. And, though people may not recall, Yahoo would go down often too. However, this is madness. If tonight was a rare occurance, several hours would be understandable. This just happens to be about the worst of a series. CML

15 Aug 2004, 04:03 PM	#48
xlr9 Senior Member Join Date: Apr 2004 Posts: 156	yeh I'm usually a pretty patient guy, but this is stupid! do any other world class email services have unplanned outages on a scale like this? [no] i love FM and I appreciate you guys keeping us up to date, but this is just a big waste of my time

15 Aug 2004, 04:04 PM	#49
oysterquartz The "e" in e-mail Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: Athens Posts: 2,402	Sorry, but this is ridiculous. Fastmail is the least reliable email and/or hosting company that I have ever used (and I've used quite a few in Europe and the USA). Eleven outages in a month is hardly "reliable". What most infuriates me is that Fastmail is pitching storage as a way to host your own domain. This is pure nonsense! Why should my domain be inaccessible due to a problem with Fastmail's database???? Visit one of my domains (thankfully an unimportant one) and you receive the following message: MessagingEngine.com down due to database outage We are currently running a recovery on our database which is taking longer than expected. UPDATE:At this point we hope to restore services at about US time 1am PDT or 4am EDT (click here to see this time in your timezone). Also check the status blog for more updates. Why wouldn't things be configured so that email is completely separate from web hosting, etc. Why does one problem totally tank the whole service? This is simply unacceptable. If any other service had this level of (un) reliability, people would be making derisive remarks and telling them to switch to an Australian provider that they know of which is so fast and reliable My whole morning in Athens is shot. Thankfully, I know better than to host business critical email at Fastmail.

15 Aug 2004, 04:05 PM	#50
bsp75088 Junior Member Join Date: Aug 2004 Posts: 4	Well...although the webmail portion of my ISP's e-mail system is less than spectacular, guess that's where my important mail should go. I need access to my e-mail from at least 4 locations so webmail is the only way to go for me. Probably shouldn't change ISP's for a while LOL.

15 Aug 2004, 04:07 PM	#52
rubberduck Junior Member Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: Sweden Posts: 21	I have paid for this service. I don't care if I get 150 MB or 2 GB storage, I use only 5 MB of it anyway. I first signed up at Fastmail because I wanted a reliable e-mail service, and yes it was... I hope we get compensated for this HUGE outgage! The only positive is that I have my own domain, so a move to another service is easy, I don't have to change e-mail address.

15 Aug 2004, 04:08 PM	#53
bsp75088 Junior Member Join Date: Aug 2004 Posts: 4	Yea, I put my personal website on fastmail. Today I put a picture of me on there....maybe THAT'S where the outage came from.

15 Aug 2004, 04:09 PM	#55
CML209 Essential Contributor Join Date: Feb 2004 Posts: 328	"My whole morning in Athens is shot. Thankfully, I know better than to host business critical email at Fastmail." Is FM listening?

15 Aug 2004, 04:11 PM	#56
FMRocks The "e" in e-mail Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: FM does NOT refer to Fastmail (anymore). Posts: 4,034	Something about the blog: The times there need to be fixed, since they are being touted as PDT. The last update says 06:16:17 PDT, and as of the time of this post, we are nowhere near 06:16:17 PDT.

15 Aug 2004, 04:12 PM	#57
kander The "e" in e-mail Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: The Netherlands Posts: 4,112	xlr: Please explain how more technical staff would prevent/help with such issues? Servers need to be patched to provide stable service (these kernel patches I believe are used to fix a longgoing stability issue where 'processes got stuck'.. technical story, very simply put the server couldn't close a particular program, but on a far more complicated scale then on a desktop computer), so it had to be applied. The database server got.. icky after that patch was applied... nothing humans could predict/prevent in that. The database is now being rebuilt. The computer is now 'crunching numbers', so to speak, and apart from the theoretical additional speed to be gained from a higher morale because there are 200 staffmembers cheering for it every time it completes a megabyte of data there's nothing more people around it can do to make it go faster, I'm afraid. Personally I'd be more happy with more or less the same amount of TechStaffers, but more servers and more balancing... it sounds to me like this database server is a very Single Point Of Failure.. --K

15 Aug 2004, 04:15 PM	#58
audelair Essential Contributor Join Date: Feb 2004 Posts: 271	Without reliability, how can FM survive? It already loses in storage and pricing and bandwidth. Not to be too blunt, but at this point, I feel like a total sucker.

15 Aug 2004, 04:18 PM	#60
memac Senior Member Join Date: May 2002 Posts: 196	Ehh, why was a new thread opened for this when one already exists? Doesn't make sense to me. I'd rather see the FM staff working on resolving the issue than continually checking this forum seeing people's complaints. They know the service is down already and that people are upset. Starting new threads to add more complaints won't get the problem resolved any faster.