News.
Service Status Updates
Those of you following TodaysMeet on Twitter may have seen a few tweets today about a styling but in Internet Explorer 8. This seems like as good a time as any to bring a new tool to your attention: Today’s Meet Service Status.
This very simple site contains short status updates, and has an RSS feed, should you need it.
I’ll be using this to post updates on the Today’s Meet service when I’m either in a place where I can’t write a full blog post, or when I’d rather concentrate on fixing the issue and explain it later. It will be the first, best place to look during outages, both planned and unplanned. Both the status feed and this blog now run on a server separate from Today’s Meet itself,
Eventually, I may configure the status updates to cross post to Twitter, but for now you’ll just have to subscribe to the feed.
For those of you interested in the details of the bug, follow me below the break. read more…
Unscheduled Downtime
There was some unscheduled downtime last night and this morning. The technical story is a corrupt database table. The human story is that people were unable to use Today’s Meet for several hours, because it, unfortunately, happened while I was asleep.
I want to apologize to anyone who was affected by this. While I can never guarantee 100% uptime, it’s still my job to provide as stable and reliable a platform as I can, and when that fails, I take it personally. I’m sorry.
If your room is missing any data, please let me know as soon as possible, through email or Twitter. My rolling backups go for a few days, but sooner is better.
The timing is lousy, because I’m starting a cross country move tomorrow, but when I land (probably about three weeks) there are some new monitoring methods I want to integrate, to catch, report and try to fix, more obscure cases like this automatically. Third party uptime monitoring only notices the most egregious errors, like whole-server crashes. Even local monitoring with tools like monit wasn’t fine-grained enough to catch this. That means it’s time to look at custom solutions.
But, as I said, I’m moving, so it will be a little while. I will make sure everything stays up and running. These problems have been pretty rare. Hopefully nothing happens while I’m driving through Nebraska!
