LinkaGoGo’s availability

You may have noticed, that we had some downtime problems early last week. What happened was that basically the server had shutdown on Sunday morning and would not reboot.

Once we noticed this, we immediately started using our backup server, which always has the previous nights backup ready to go. But it turned out the software wasn’t configured correctly, it then took a couple of hours before the backup server was configured correctly and we could start the backup server.

Having run that for a couple hours it turned out that some members reported strange behavior such as unfamiliar links appearing on their pages. This turned out to be caused by a buggy (newer !!!) version of the application server we were using. So we had to fall back to an earlier version of the software and then everything started working correctly (but slower) on the backup server.

In the meantime our official server was able to reboot again and after some checks and couple more test reboots continued to act normal again. On Tuesday morning we were back to our official server.

The main lesson I learned from this is that these were two very stressful days and that I don’t intend to get a lot more of these. In the 5 years we are operational this was the second major outage we had (The previous one was in August 2004, I was in Paris at the time of the outage)

So based on this experience and the feedback that I got I’m going to take the following actions:

1. As soon as the event occurs, announce on the announcement forum that there is a problem and then start working on it.


2. Make an uptime report available that shows the status of the website and some uptime statistics. This report is generated by a third-party monitor service Hyperspin and checks every minute if the site is still up.


3. Improve our hardware health monitor, which will allow us to take preventative maintenance.


4. Introduce more redundancy into our service infrastructure so we do not rely on one server. This will improve uptime and if we go down should be able to minimize the downtime. We are investigating difference service redundancy options, which hopefully gives us some performance advantages as well and will require additional investments.

With action 1 and 2 implemented and working on action 3 and 4 in the next few weeks you should expect less disruptions in the service, and in the case there is a disruption be better informed. It will also give me more peace of mind.

Since I’m concentrating on the implementing these actions, the beta program for the Webservice API and LinkaGoGo Organizer will be extended by 2 more months.

GoGolian
p.s Outages such as this is one of the reasons we implemented the weekly automatic email of your backup (You can find this premium feature under Options/Account)

Happy New Year

Just returned from a couple of days of skiing at Sunday River in Maine. It was beautiful up there, 8 mountains, fresh snow. I know it is not the Alps, but not bad for a three-hour drive from Boston. Tested out my new ski gear and these new curved skies are excellent, did not get tired nor got any muscle ache.

Was pretty un-connected up- there, no WIFI or broadband in sight. But thanks to the online website monitoring service Hyperspin was able to stay informed of the well-being of linkaGoGo.

Anyway didn’t have a change yet to wish everyone a happy and prosperous 2006. That reminds me, I need to update the Copyright messages to include 2006. It says now Copyright 2001-2006. In May we’ll celebrate our 5th anniversary.

Happy New Year,
GoGolian

A linkaGoGo command line in your browser

When you think about the Browser search boxes, you could think of them as a command line to a search engine. Browser search boxes can be found in all the major browsers nowadays. In Firefox you can find it on the top right of the application.

With the Google search engine you can do a search by typing in a search string and then hit <enter>. But Google does more then just search. Type in 21+21 and hit <enter> and Googe turns into a calculator. Or type ‘100 dollar in euro’ and it turns into currency converter. This feature turns the Search box into a command line for Google.

You can do the same with linkaGoGo. You can off course add a search plug-in to search your linkaGoGo bookmarks. See the linkaGoGo Addon page. But even cooler is when you can access your linkaGoGo Smart Bookmarks from the Browser Search box. For those who don’t know the linkaGoGo Smart Bookmarks yet, see this instructional video. I will do a Tips and Tricks section on it some other day. Basically it allows your bookmarks to take arguments. For example a bookmark to Google can take an argument, which is the Search string. So you can type:

Google linkaGoGo

Where Google is the name of the bookmark and linkaGoGo is the search string. You can make the command even shorter by using the Alias property. For example ‘gg’ as the alias for Google. The command would look like this:

gg linkaGoGo

Other examples are:

q msft (Retrieve stock quote for Microsoft)
w 02420 (Weather for zipcode 02420)
etc.

I added a linkaGoGo Smart bookmark plugin for Firefox on the Addons page so you can type these commands right into your Firefox searchbar without first loading the linkaGoGo Home page.

This combination of your linkaGoGo Smart bookmarks and a Browser search plugin allows you to create your own browser commands, now how cool is that?

GoGolian