blunders and near misses
¶ by Rob FrieselF_D was hit pretty hard since Sunday by a major outage in the Spacey cluster in the Dreamhost network. In a nutshell: shit was down for days.
Where do we stand?
As of this evening, and after lots of unacceptably bad best case scenarios described, the damage is relatively minimal. Mail has been back solidly for a while; A.’s project seems to have escaped the outage with a little stress and downtime as its only casualty; this blog here has fared slightly worse. Things seem to be back up and no data seems to have been lost but the WordPress admin app was curiously inaccessible at first. Trawling the forums turned up a tip that recommended adding DirectoryIndex index.php to the root .htaccess file and though this appeared to buy us a ticket in, it’s horrendously slow to load the Dashboard page. The only other thing that seems to help folks is a complete reinstallation.
Hmm… I’d rather not. Time will tell if I can live with the slow initial load or not. I’m backing up my plugins, my custom theme, etc. in the meantime.
As for the hosting provider… Dreamhost has been a pretty good value to date. We pay next to nothing for what we’ve got through them and thus far the service has been good and the uptime tolerable. What has me torn is that on the one hand, this inflammatory response appears in the comment thread of the related post of their system status blog:
…but it’s a comment thread so… Really, that could have come from anywhere. The official email response that went around was much better, talking about a full recovery of the data and a credit toward the effected accounts, etc. Which does seem like an adequate response… So again: I guess we’ll see what happens.
In the meantime: (1) Backing up and (2) any of you dear readers have any idea why that .htaccess trick would help but still jam things down to a creeping crawl?
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