The data center where our Pocket-Monkey kit is located is/was having some trouble with its network. At about 15:55 GMT (just over an hour ago as I write this) we became inaccessible for a bit, so I took the site down for half an hour. We're back now, but I have timeouts turned off until I hear back from the data center guys about how confident they are of things remaining stable. Figure they'll be off until Saturday morning in order to give anyone who couldn't get in time to play.
They're large, very complex, and of necessity ever-changing. They're also periodically under attack. The network routing problem we experienced came in the aftermath of other servers in the data center being the target of a DDoS attack. Although they couldn't say for sure that our problem was a knock-on from that (they couldn't account for our problem at all, by the time they looked at our problem ticket it had already sorted itself out, which makes diagnosis difficult), it may well have been.
The current one we're with seems (touch wood) to be the best so far. Since I took over running PM from Jock (about nine years ago), we've used five different hosting companies, both small and large. Price competition being fierce in the hosting sector, some of the previous companies we've used have clearly cut costs by using poorly-trained staff and continuing to use equipment that should have been replaced. I remember with one of our previous hosts, in an eight-month period we had five hard drive failures. HDD failures are the most common problem in data centers (the drives take a beating!), which is why we run PM on redundant drives, but that company was clearly not replacing equipment in a timely way.
But until or unless we run PM on servers in more than one data center, we'll have these small niggles perodically. It's the nature of the beast. (If we ran PM on servers in more than one data center, we'd still have the problems, but as with the HDD failures you probably won't notice them because the data center with the problem would just stop getting used until it came back.)
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