Atlanta Virtual Down this morning?

Knive network is almost up. They have a notice posted saying it is closed and will open at 5pm today. So maybe the problems are almost fixed.
 
My site is back up and running as of this morning.

Maybe just a little longer and everyone will be back up.

I'll guarantee that Alex is working hard on it.

Robert
 
Mine is still down which I wish weren't so, especially since the renewal hosting fee was just charged to my account....

but this one really concerns me, the only way to get to the Knifemakers' Guild forums is

http://www.knifemakersguildforums.com/forums/index.php

At least the forums are up, and have been since yesterday mid-day, but the rest of the site is not available.

IF Alex hadn't spent all the time he has building Good-Will and friendships, etc.
think what alot of customers would be saying now....
If ANY company doesn't understand the value of Marketing, not just product or service, but the Company itself, this is a prime example of that value!
 
The site being down doesn't realy bother me.... I only get ~5 hits a month.... :(

The kicker for me is the e-mail... its what all my customers have. Several deals going and I can't get a hold of anyone, and they can't contact me.

I do believe that something has happened other than just a problem with their switch over... possibly something big at the servers they were going to... Other parts of the web, with other hosts, have been buggy for 4 or 5 days...

Hope Alex gets some sleep soon... 50+ hours is rough...

G.
 
They must have run into another snag. The Knife Network still has the same notice that it will be back on at 5PM yesterday.
 
About 165,000 Web sites knocked offline by NaviSite outage

Linda Rosencrance

November 06, 2007 (Computerworld) Approximately 165,000 Web sites have been offline since Saturday, thanks to a failed data center migration involving Andover, Mass.-based Web hosting company NaviSite Inc.

The problems started Saturday when NaviSite attempted to migrate and replace hundreds of servers operated by Baltimore-based Alabanza Corp., a Web hosting company acquired by NaviSite in August.

According to NaviSite spokesman Rathin Sinha, NaviSite decided to physically move 200 of the 850 servers operated by Alabanza to NaviSite's data center in Andover and then virtually migrate the data from the rest of the older servers to new boxes, also in Andover.
NaviSite let its customers know that their sites would be down for a while on Saturday, with the migration expected to be finished that day, Sinha said. But when NaviSite attempted to transfer the data from the 650 servers still in Baltimore it ran into a number of synchronization failures that kept multiplying.

As Saturday progressed, NaviSite realized it would probably miss its completion deadline; as a result, company officials decided to physically transfer another 200 servers from Baltimore to Andover to help reduce the scope of the virtual migration and speed up the data transfer.
But then NaviSite ran into more problems. As the hosts came up, their URLs did not, so although customers could access their Web sites from their IP address, they could not do so using their URLs, Sinha said.

"That was unanticipated," he said.

As NaviSite tried to solve that problem, the network became overloaded because of all the customers trying to get online, Sinha said. "What happened was first the URL could not match with the IP address and then IP did not match with the machine, so it took some time, and all this time we have a highly trafficked overloaded network," he said. "If there is one little problem, they multiply because there is a lot of dependencies."
Although Sinha said a "big chunk" of sites are back online, he could not say when everything might be back to normal. He also couldn't say how much this failed migration would cost -- NaviSite is a publicly-traded company.

To put it mildly, one of NaviSite's customers, Cynthia Brumfield, president of Emerging Media Dynamics Inc., an analyst firm in Washington, seems to be furious.

In an interview, Brumfield said she's going into her fourth day without access to her Web sites. And she said she doesn't believe the way NaviSite is spinning the story. While NaviSite said it has brought a large number of Web sites back online, she claims it hasn't.

"According to people who have talked to NaviSite's tech personnel, they were ill equipped for the relocation and ignorant of how to accomplish even basic tasks," she said in a blog post. "At this point, NaviSite's poorly planned data center consolidation has slipped from mere incompetence to outrageous indifference to its customers' needs and should be grounds for legal action, if not government sanctions of some kind."

Brumfield said that, in effect, NaviSite yanked the servers for 200,000 Web sites, put them on trucks and then didn't know what to do once the servers arrived in Andover. "But what's worse, NaviSite had informed its clients of a completely different timetable and process for the server relocation than the one implemented," she said in the blog posting.
In the interview, Brumfield said that because all of her backup files are also stored on Alabanza's servers, she has no choice but to hop on a plane to Boston on Wednesday and drive to Andover to retrieve her data. And she said she's bringing a video camera with her to document NaviSite's response to her request.
 
8:15 and still no love here.

For what it's worth, I agree with Mrs. Brumfield, it looks like these folks were quite incompetent. I've done several of these migrations in the past and never had problems like this. "The URLs don't match the IPs"??? Big news here, the DNS should have already been setup and ready to roll over before they shut a single machine down. When you migrate 165,000 hosts, you verify and test beforehand, we do have some standards and practices in our industry after all. Propagating through the internet is one thing, not doing the work is quite another.

I'm not blaming Alex for the entirety of this fiasco, but I sure hope he considers a new co-lo, because I don't feel at all comfortable with these guys.
 
Thanks, Bobby. 8:30am, Wednesday. Out for four days now.....

No, neither I nor my employer's website is up, and I just had my boss Google this news (which came up). It will calm things briefly knowing this is NOT Atlanta Virtual's doing, but this lousy NaviSite's handiwork. AV is just one of many suppliers affected.

Ugghhh. :thumbdn:

Coop
 
Thanks for posting that info Bobby!! From there, I googled "navisite outage" and read more about the story. Wow...is sounds like a real mess!!

I seem to be back to 100% and have all of my functions working since mid morning yesterday.

But, after further reading this morning...I'm having nightmares about the thought of some toothless bubba accidently running over the server with my data on it while contracted to move a a couple hundred of them in his F-150 over night. (this is strictly a figure of my imagination).

So...it raises the topic about protecting yourself and backing up your own data.

So, how do you back-up an entire web site?

Rob
 
Beginning of day #5, still no website, and still no webmail. After reading the announcement on AV's site first thing this morning, it made it sound like everything was up and running again....guess not. 5 days without the website in this business is an eternity......the phone hasn't rang one since this outage occurred, and usually I field 5-10 inquiries a day! What bothers me now is the repercussions that this outage/migration will have. Hopefully the after effects will be few, but I've been through this stuff before, and it seems every time, I've had to deal with website problems for months afterwards.
 
But they must be making some progress, Knife Network is up and I have done searches and checked most all internal links. Hopefully all you guys that depend on them for a living will be back up and running soon.
I do not understand why they did not plan, nor mirror and test each site before pulling the plug. Dumb.:grumpy:
James
 
I have the same fears as you do Ed. We could be seeing effects from this for several weeks.
 
Alex has always been straight up and professional with me. I have no doubt that he got caught up in a bad situation trying to give us better service. I only have one of my three sites up and will hang in there because I do have total faith in AV and Alex.
BB
 
Hi Rob, I don't mess with the AV admin panel much, so I don't know if there's a clicky way to do a backup from them, but I have my entire site on my hard drive. You can download a program for windows called wget (it's actually a GNU/*nix thing that's ported) and you can get a localized copy or a regular copy of your entire website as the world sees it. You can also ftp into your AV website (this is how I do all of my administration) and pull down the entire site. If you don't have an ftp client, I recommend using Filezilla, since it's free, easy to use and very full-featured. If use just use command line ftp, you can replace the "get" command with "mget" and use wildcards, like "mget *", but, depending on size and complexity, it can become quite tedious to download your website in that manor.

Koyote mentioned using curl before, this will also work if you want to transfer a mirror of your site to another server or *nix machine. I don't know if there's a port of curl for windows. For those people who use an of AV's shopping cart functionality, I do *not* know what problems you will encounter if you offload a backup onto another host. I don't know anything about their premium services, sorry :(

If anyone would like help with that after the AV site is back up and running, let me know and I'll try to help out.
 
Before I went to bed around midnight I checked and my site was up along with my control panel. Guess what? Its not working again. Did sell a knife on Blade Gallery.
 
Whew!! Thanks for the effort Acridsaint...but, you lost me.

I would like to save everything that I have hosted by AV onto my PC. (From there, I can burn it onto a few CDs..or something. )

Not just the web site...but there are folders with misc stuff that also needs to be saved. Ideally, it would be great to save the entire file structure as well. I'm thinking I should do this ASAP in case Navisite has an accident with my data while they are frantically trying to resolve the problems.

I do most of my website editing with MS Frontpage.

I just looked around in the AV control panel and didn't see anything in there that made sense...there is a tool called anonFTP...but I dunno what it does.

Hmmm...I need a step by step tutorial explaining how to save everything on my AV host..to my PC here in the office.

i.e:

Step 1. Download this program easywebsave.exe ...
Step 2. Click..
Step ... Drag
..
..
.
Final Step...Have a beer and relax:D:D
 
Sure Rob, it really is about as easy as your steps. The first thing to do is download filezilla (this is a link directly to the windows installer).

Double click the exe, install the program and start it up. At the top of the screen you'll see a place for Address, Username, Password and Port. The address is your website, UN/PW are the same as you use for the control panel and the port is 21. I actually use the IP address that AV gave me instead of my website address, but either should work just fine. After you fill them in, click on the quick connect button.

Now you'll see the entire root directory structure of your website on the right side and your computer's hard drive on the left. On the left side, browse down to where you want to save the files and click/drag the files from right to left. The folders that have an arrow on them are symbolic links to another folder and don't need to be grabbed. If I could get into my website I could give you a screenshot of exactly what I mean :(

That's it. After you've used the quick connect once, you can click the down arrow next to it and select your website, so you won't have to type any of that stuff again.

Let me know if that doesn't work.
 
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