Positron is down at least for last few hours.

Everything should be back up now. We actually experienced three separate outages with Positron today. The first one started around 1:30 am PDT, the 2nd was around 5:30 am, and the most recent was at about 7:40 pm. The good news is that we were able to get a useful stack dump during this most recent outage. The bad news, of course, is that the server went down 3 times.

As many of you know Positron has been a source of recurring problems for us. We have already made a number of changes over the last few months in the hopes of getting it to behave, but it is becoming more and more obvious that the issue is purely hardware related, most likely a stick of bad RAM. Unfortunately, with how heavily Positron is used, it has been exceedingly difficult to find appropriate times to work on it. With as many outages as we have on it due to lockups like today, we do not want to subject our customers to even more downtime while we do work on it.

We will be scheduling what we hope to be the final downtime for Positron within the next few weeks. We will post a precise time and date by Tuesday of this week.

We just had another outage on Positron this morning around 2:00 am PDT. We will be keeping a close eye on the machine for the rest of the day today. Tomorrow we will be announcing the maintenance schedule for Positron. Given the recent problems an emergency maintenance might be necessary, so there might only be a few hours notice prior to a scheduled downtime.

During this downtime we will be migrating the data from Positron to new hardware and installing a new version of the kernel. We hope that this migration will solve any outstanding issues. If an emergency maintenance would cause severe problems for your site or business at some point during this upcoming week please let us know what at what times this would happen and we will try to schedule the maintenance around this window. Thank you all again for your patience with these repeated problems and do not hesitate to contact us with any questions or concerns.

it’s down again right now. pinging comes back with something, but ssh does not personally I would prefer to be inconvenienced now with more downtime and have any issues fixed for good instead of enduring more random outages for an indeterminate time. that’s my vote at least.

It popped up a few secs ago.

We experienced 3 more outages since last night. We had one around 8:30 pm, another around 10 pm, and the most recent at 3:30 am this morning. We’re going to be scheduling emergency maintenance for this afternoon at 1:30 pm PDT. To allow time for plenty of things to go wrong, we’re going to schedule the downtime to run until 5:30 pm PDT, but we do expect it to go considerably faster than that. We’ll be posting updates here as we go along to give people a better idea of what’s going on and when to expect things to come back up.

Hi. hunterword.com ain’t working. I keep getting “We’re sorry, but something went wrong. We’ve been notified about this issue and we’ll take a look at it shortly.” I’m at the Democratic National Convention and need the site.

Site not working, still.

Don’t know if this will help but the last time the site stopped working July 23, the student tech who use to work with me emailed the following: “It looks like Planet Argon upgraded something on their end which caused a problem with way that the image processing plug-in the site is using told the application framework to load the image processing library it relies on … all of which manifested itself via an extremely misleading error message pointing at code file that had nothing to do with the actual problem.”

Don’t know if that will help but I thought I would forward it.

So: The problem wasn’t with Positron. The problem was an easy glitch prompted by me and could have easily been fixed if I hadn’t panicked and was a little more tech savvy [which is happening]. I think the panic had to due with the pressure and deadlines of covering the Democratic National Convention. Anyway, thanks PA and Ross.

Site is not responding. Nor are the two blogs.