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For many times now, Blogdrive have chosen to insert an additional text into all blogs and pages "informing" users they are upgrading servers. Sure, we should actually be grateful that they are in fact "informing" us, which under normal circumstances, they don't.
Blogdrive automatically inserts this line of code into the end of all files stored on Blogdrive. Including CSS and JS files.
<p align=center>Upgrading servers.
We'll be back up in a few of minutes.
We are currently storing submitted entries
for later processing.</p> Now, let's not let the issue of "informing" users of downtime. The issue I'm facing now, has to do with Blogdrive, automatically inserting additional text into my .js files, making them obsolete and not working. I use lotsa external javascript files which are hosted on Blogdrive. But whenever they insert this tags, all my blogs would fail to execute. So the solution to this problem, without informing Blogdrive of the problem (as they are always too "busy" to pay any attention to a Magnum (plan 4) subscriber such as myself), I simple insert a double slash at the very end of all my js documents. It does the trick, wonderfully. By inserting a double slash, I basically "comment-out" the auto-inserted code. Oh, how genius of me to stop a war, not get angry fix the small problem.
Job title: Archivist
Description of position:
Using MACs, duties will include: scanning and studying pictures;
providing picture sellers with the images they require; meeting
press and magazine requirements; and updating the website bank of
pictures. The postholder will be working independently and will
be working on a two-week probation period for a fixed fee before
January 2007.
The position is due to commence in February 2007.
Employer: Homes of Football
About the company:
Photographer specialising in images of football.
Location: Ambleside, Cumbria.
Skills they're looking for:
Logical, autonomous and able to cope with computer crashes.
Salary: £17,000
How to apply:
Send CV and CL to Stuart Clarke, The Homes of Football, 100 Lake
Road, Ambleside, Cumbria LA22 0DB
Tel: 01539 434440
E-mail: info@homesoffootball.co.uk
Closing date: 30/11/2006
Website: www.footballphotographyandtheworld.co.uk
Surprice surprice! Blogdrive announced that they will be doing server maintenance from 3/10 till 5/10 (or was it just the 4th and 5th?).
Can you believe it? they actually took the courtesy to let us know! I'm so happy for them. Yay!
This can be found on the left bottom corner the moment you login.
http://www.blogdrive.com/manage/
Update to the update: 10/04/06:
We will be performing some more maintenance tomorrow, 10/05/06 between the hours of 11:00 AM to 8:00 PM PST.
Update 10/03/06:
We will be performing some routine maintenance on 10/04/06 between the hours of 11:00 AM to 8:00 PM PST. Sections of the site may not accessible during this time.
Blogdrive Team
And on the Blogdrive Update site (http://update.blogdrive.com/archive/6.html) is a new entry regarding the server maintenance.
Wow... I'm soo glad! I hoping Blogdrive will continue doing this in the future.
As everybody already know, Blogdrive has recently moved their data center, promising every blogdriver a better service with less down time. I was very looking forward to this event as this would definitely make Blogdrive a competent blogging platform. (And benefit my fellow readers  )
To me, Blogdrive is a wonderful work of art, programming, business and internet technology. Of course by saying that, I did not take into consideration the frequent downtime, the rude customer service, the slow responce time (in terms of everything: customer service, releasing new upgrades, and server fixes), the defensive sensitive forum regulars, and of course the deadly-inconsiderate-evil-money-minded spammers.
There are a few conspiracies regarding what actually happened behind the scenes. AH hah! I knew you love conspiracies. 
The move started on June 29th, as indicated in this entry. But by July 21st, it still wasn't completed. It was until Auguest 30th where there were signs of "almost done". Till now, I'm not sure if they are completely finished with the move but the red notice that was in the blog management area were now removed. After two months.
Michael has always been very good at telling stories, I loved the way he put things into an easy to understand, emotionally touching story line. But what really happened isn't always what the story claims, usually. It's true that the real Blogdrive crew consists of Michael, Tim, Jeff and Rick. Each specializing in different areas.
What's untrue is... the number of servers claimed. There's only one server, for all I know. And judging from the quality of server responce time, nothing has changed.
It is kept very cold inside to keep the thousands of servers safe from heat damage. It is also very loud in the data center due to the monster ACs and the thousands of server fans running.
Thousands of servers... right! Has Blogdrive improved their service so far? I, still see no difference.
As always, Michael make up good stories on his expriences working on Blogdrive. I'm afraid it might dissappear one day like the other stories so I decided to post it here too. You can head over to the forum and read them all there. This is also a n update of their progress in moving data centers.
(Short version)
I apologize for the down time we've been experiencing. Things are looking quite good now. After performing a system upgrade to power hardware on 8/26/06 we were faced with an unexpected challenge that caught us off guard. It took a while to identify the cause which is why it was difficult if not impossible to give an ETA to Blogdrive members during this time. We did attempt to place info on the home page; however this was not always viewable. Thank you for your patience. We will do our best to make certain this does not happen again.
(Long version)
The day the world went away
The events of 8/26/06 explained:
It was morning. Another sunny day here in Southern California, filled with magic and wonder. Nothing out of the norm. Little did we know tragedy was just around the corner for Blogdrive.
We were adding some hardware to the Blogdrive array of servers; line conditioners, rebooters, etc. We had to shut down all of Blogdrive to do this, which is not unusual as we shut down servers often to perform repairs and such. Shutting down and starting up servers is done in a specific sequence. We are schooled in this and did not anticipate any difficulties. However, after reboot something went terribly wrong.
Tim is our main server programmer. Besides being a great programmer he is also an awesome drummer (He insisted that I put the word "awesome" in there.) We have the servers setup to send Tim pages via his cell phone when they are in trouble. They were in trouble. Tim's cell phone sounded like an unstoppable mini Star Wars battle in his pocket.
The "data center" is where all the blogdrive servers are housed (there is also an outside backup location.) The data center occupies an entire floor of a very large building in Los Angeles. The security there is very tight. There are guards with monitors, a security desk, an area to place your entire hand for identification and several cards and keys to open doors and elevators. There are rows of racks and cages. It is kept very cold inside to keep the thousands of servers safe from heat damage. It is also very loud in the data center due to the monster ACs and the thousands of server fans running. Tim is often herd yelling "Speak up!" and "Why is everyjuan friggin' whispering on me?!"
Many of the Blogdrive servers are setup in a redundant array, each with multiple drives duplicating data and exchanging load and requests. This way if a drive fails or explodes or moves on to the next life, we can change it out for a new juan, re-sync it to the others and begin replicating data again. This means no data is lost and no down time experienced.
Needless to say when the pages started flooding in we all panicked; in a calm inward maintained programmer-like panic. All of the servers started shutting down and rebooting on there own in a crazy Ghost in the Machine kinda way. Tim with a link via computer tried to intervene and connect a minimum of resources to gain some control of the situation. They would not have it. I along with Jeff and Rick started pulling severs out of the cages and connecting them to other power sources. I held juan of them in my arms as it was convulsing. I looked over at the guys and screamed, "Is this how it ends? Is this how it ends?!" I set the dying server down and placed my hands to my head, slowing stepping back, then started screaming uncontrollably like a little girl. Or so they tell me.
It seemed there was nothing we could do to put an end to this madness. We checked everything; rebooters, switches, routers, etc. There was nothing. We then really started to panic, in a "what do you mean we're out of coffee?!" kinda panic. We pulled all the servers off line. Blogdrive went silent.
We brought many of the servers home with us to repair any damages that occurred to the data base, and or hardware. As I drove down the street I thought about all the servers I was carrying, the Blogdrivers and all their blogs, all their stories. I also thought about my driving skills, the fact that I was almost out of gas and had juan headlight out. Over the period of a few days we repaired damages and were able to put minimum systems online. We continued to work on the servers at my home. We slept when we could; me in my bedroom and Tim on the sofa, no funny business here. We assumed that we had experienced a strange power spike. We posted what we could to Blogdrive members. Although we did not have an eta, after much thought we knew we were close to an answer.
After further inspection of the servers, Tim felt the answer must be in the power source; something fluctuating in power, something undetected by the other equipment. It was juan of the most improbable possibilities. It would mean that the actual power source coming to the Blogdrive cages in the data center was at fault. This is like blaming a wall outlet. Very unlikely.
We brought the servers back to the data center. With new meters we tested the power source to the cages. It was true! There were severe power fluctuations in the line. It apparently caused damage to the equipment used to protect us from such things. Quickly we re-routed the power to a clean source. We mounted the servers and began syncing them. They were very happy. Blogdrive went back online with full functionality in the early hours of 8/30/06. It will take a week or so to get everything completely up to snuff, but this should not show much influence on the system.
I'd like to apologize to anyjuan affected by this challenge. We had never experienced such an outage before. We will do our best to keep such events from ever happening again.
I'd like to thank the following people:
Veronica over at Fry's Electronics - You got it going on baby!
The folks at Dunken Doughnuts – Remember, it's all about the Maple Bars.
Tracy at the security desk – Thanks for locking me out twice!
My girlfriend Erin who said – "Did you know there's a guy sleeping on our sofa"
I'd also like to thank all the Modulators including JFZ, Ang, Anthony and Sinj for their support. You guys rock me!
Btw,
During the wee hours of the morning at the data center I saw ghosts roaming through the various server cages and hallways. I tried to track them down, you know, to speak with them, but they kept disappearing. They seemed to be dancing at times, wearing nice clothing and such. I was tired. Sounds like a Made For TV movie to me.
Michael
Blogdrive
Update:
We'll be moving data centers on 6/29/06. During this time Blogs will be displayed but will only show posts that were made up until 6/28/06 5 PM PST till after the move is complete.
That was about a month ago when the notice is put up. I wonder when will the work be finished, or if they have already completed the work. Speaking of being efficient.
As everyone can tell, the downtime for our favourite blog host has just occured. Cause of downtime is of course unknown, it's top secret (Blogdrive will have to kill you(in secret) if you figure it out the secret, it's bad for publicity)
There has been a HUGE, I mean it HUGE voice of anger in the Blogdrive forum. And not a single response from Blogdrive themselves.
The frequency of downtime is occuring more and more frequent compared to a few years back. Here are some of the most popular reasons given by Blogdrive whenever there's a down time:
1) Hurricane, this is an annual event and it doesn't just occur once a year but several. Whenever lighting strike, when the storms are strong, one of the internet router will *boom* and so there goes the 30,000 other Blogdrive blogs. This is far worst than a woman's PMS.
2) Upgrading server (or software), I'm not sure what its updating really. Whenever it say upgrading server, I hardly ever see any new features that comes with it either. Well, maybe sometimes (like the comment spam protection) although the down time could be of entirely different reason.
3) DoS attacks. Oooh... I absolutely hate it when these hackers have nothing better to do and choose to launch an attack on Blogdrive. Come on, why would anybody want to harm Blogdrive, there's 30 thousand innocent souls at stake. Say no to War on Iraq!
4) Spammer steals bandwidth. Yeah, these dirty bastard who are trying to make a quick buck on pharmaceutical products and pornography "steal" bandwidth. How? Erm... I don't know... I just know that it caused down time here on Blogdrive. (oh, really?)
5) Seige's Fault. It's all my fault. I didn't meant it. I didn't want anybody to get hurt but because the toilet isn't working I had to find an alternative target to satisfy my "nature calls". All this downtime is caused by waiting for the server drying up and for the toilet pump to be fixed. Disaster eh?
(In case you haven't realise, number five is totally made up and I've never actually seen the server before. Accept for a sexy picture of it here.)
Oh, and don't ask me why on earth update.blogdrive.com wasn't updated with any news about the downtime. All I know is that if you found out why Blogdrive was down, you'd better watch out because you might be murdered in a tragic death where all your body parts are broken into pieces and thrown into the river with no trace at all.
What was I on again? Right, WHY wasn't update.blogdrive.com UPDATED?
Tags: blogdrive, server, forum, downtime,
je ne comprends pas le français
I don't understand French
Some people have reported some weirdness within their blogs in the forums. One of them even grabbed a screen shot. Fortunately, the problem didn't stay long. Not long enough for me to even notice it. So, it's fine with me. As Gloria who have said: In my experience, with blogs, if you didn't do anything to break it, you don't need to do anything to fix it.
Reference: My blog entries are in symbles ;-;, The Controversial Symbols, Strange characters and no pictures showing up on my blog!, Tags: Blogdrive, Server, Synchronisation,
Some blogs are experiencing this problem at the moment as I type. Nothing major I think since I haven't come across any outage.
<p align=center>Upgrading servers. We'll be back up in a few of minutes.<br>We are currently storing submitted entries for later processing.</p>
The funny thing is, apparently Deanna's blog is displaying the above code "automatically" at the bottom of her Comment's page and Index page. I don't see it on other blogs though. It could be that she's on an upgraded account but I don't see that on other upgraded account. Any idea why? (could it be Deanna being mischievous and doing it on purpose?) HAH! *Update: I spotted it on my own blog... that thing exist...Tags: Blogdrive, Servers, Upgrade,
There was a topic in the forum devoted to reporting the status of Blogdrive not too long ago (one month to be exact). But after a short while it disappeared. I wasn't sure why the admin removed it but I do know that people aren't happy that it was taken down.
I do know that people are happy when they can be informed of the status of Blogdrive when they find something not working well with their blog. At least some kinda note or message that give them a bit of relief of some sort.
The forum, used to be filled with angry voices whenever a technical problem arises have been the one of the destination that people go to for advices. The other is the main tagboard, of course.
Now, let us put our hands together and give around of applause to the official Blogdrive update:
Let's hope it gets updated regularly. (not too regular, we don't want bad news, do we?) Reference: Blogdrive Update Forum, Tags: Blogdrive, Update, Server, Status,
GrabPERF is a blog performance monitoring website. Basically it checks the quality of responces from different blog servers. The shorter the time of responce, the better the service is. Click here for BlogDrive server performance history. BlogDrive's server performance isn't too bad. Good Job I must say! The "Page not found" issues are almost fixed now, I think. Check the GrabPERF website. References: BlogDrive Disaster, GrabPERF BlogDrive,
Tags: GrabPERF, BlogDrive, Servers,
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