As many of you have no doubt noticed, our servers have been ill behaved the last week or so. Our servers lost power at the hosting facility last Wednesday. Since then, we have been getting period disconnects of all machines at that facility. These disconnects typically last less than 2 minutes, but sometimes happen a couple of times an hour, so they get rather noticeable.

We have been trying to isolate the issue and as of yesterday we think we have it narrowed down to a single connection. We will be working throughout the day today (Monday) with our internet provider to get this issue diagnosed and rectified. As we work through this process we will be posting updates here to keep everyone informed of what’s going on.

We apologize for any inconvenience these brief interruptions may have caused you. If you have any questions or concerns about this process please feel free to post feedback here or email us at support@planetargon.com. Thank you again for your understanding and we look forward to having these issues resolved very soon.

So we believe the issue is resolved now. I just spoke to our internet provider and we were seeing the same error from both ends, which is a good sign. We’ve put a fix in place that should take care of the issue moving forward (technical details below for those who are interested). We will be keeping a close eye on things for the rest of the day today to try and make sure that no further issues crop up.

For those interested in the gory technical details, the issue appears to have been caused by a duplex mismatch between our switch and the provider’s switch on the other end. They were both set to auto-negotiate, so we’d start out at 100-base full-duplex. Then, after a while, the connection would flake out which would cause the switch to switch to 10-base half-duplex. Then a bit later, it would go back to 100-full, then 10-half, then 100-full, then 10-half, then… and therein lies the problem.

We’ve manually forced our switch to 100-base full-duplex as have they, so that should take care of things. If there are any further issues we will of course be in touch with our provider immediately to make sure that it’s resolved quickly.

After monitoring the situation all day I’m glad to say that it looks like it’s all resolved at this point. If anyone experiences any further issues with please contact us and we’ll take care of it as quickly as possible.