Shooting Sports Blog

Be aware that tonight at 12:00pm CST Shooting Sports Blog may experience some down time due to an ongoing hardware problem.  Over the past few weeks you may have noticed intermittent down time due to a storage segment causing server failure.

The hardware problem was identified by our hosting provider MediaTemple and should be rectified later tonight early in the morning. We were notified of the downtime and resolution recently in an e-mail.  We apologize for the inconvenience this may cause.  The outage will affect e-mail as well as blog access.

The message below is from MediaTemple:

(mt) Media Temple would like to notify you and the Contacts on your account of an upcoming emergency maintenance that will affect one of your hosting related services.

DATE/TIME WINDOW:
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Monday, January 26th 2009 10:00 PM PT – 2:00 AM PT Tuesday, January 27th 2009

To see when this maintenance window will occur in a different timezone please click here: http://mediatemple.net/go/date/0901262200

PER-CUSTOMER IMPACT:
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Approximately 90 minutes

AFFECTED RESOURCES:
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(gs) Storage Segment #04 on (gs) Cluster #01

If you are receiving this notification you are part of the affected service group.

MAINTENANCE ACTION:
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Engineers will be performing emergency hardware maintenance on a storage segment of (gs) Cluster #01 later tonight. Customers should prepare for a disruption of web, FTP, email, and other associated services. We estimate that approximately 90 minutes of this maintenance window will result in actual service unavailability.

We will be upgrading a component of the (gs) Storage Subsystem to use a newer hardware revision. This is being done to address a known issue with the current hardware resource. Our Storage Vendor and (mt) Engineers have both concluded that this action will improve overall stability and performance levels, as well as to address an issue that occurred earlier today which resulted in a widespread service disruption for customers on Cluster.1. This was covered throughout the day on our System Status weblog section: http://weblog.mediatemple.net/weblog/category/system-incidents/2009-01-26-cluster1-availability/

As this change is managed entirely by us, you will not need to make any software or configuration modifications on your end. We have performed this same maintenance action in the past on several other storage resources with positive results.

This preventative maintenance action is a necessary and vital task that will ensure the long term uptime and reliability of your server. Should you have any questions regarding this scheduled maintenance please open a support request inside the (mt) AccountCenter at the following URL: https://ac.mediatemple.net/

Regards,

(mt) Media Temple, Inc
Hosting Operations
8520 National Blvd.
Building A
Culver City, CA 90232

<24/7 toll-free>: 877-578-4000
<24/7 international>: +1-310-841-5500
www.mediatemple.net

We would like to apologize for the intermittent outages over the past few days. Due to a spam attack last week and upgrades to the system left some securtit vulnerabilities which have been fixed and our webmaster staff will continue to monitor the problem and upgrade our security.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. We are back up and running and will continue to make every effort to make sure your experience with shooting sports blog is a safe and enjoyable one. If you notice something out of the ordinary or what you believe is not appropriate please bring this to our attention.

We have made some changes to the system to help insure the integrity of the blog is free of spammers. We have tightened security to insure that sign in is indeed a human an not an automated spam attack. These changes you might view as a nuisance and we apologize. We made these changes as a last resort to keep the integrity in check. If you have questions about the changes don’t hesitate to use any contact form to reach us.

Regards,

Shooting Sports Staff

Late yesterday we were notified by our hosting company that our MYSQL database was going to get an upgrade.  The upgrade went as planned with no noticeable outage to normal operations.

We have seen no interuption or negative effects of the change.  If you notice any differences with your blog please notiyfy us using the contact form.