Remote View

3w ago

Lemmy.ca downtime Jan 5th/6th - Whew, we're finally back!

Hey everyone, and happy new year!

Sorry about that super long downtime there. Yesterday (Sunday) morning at 10:03AM PST our server suffered a physical hardware failure, apparently a power supply failure. Unfortunately despite opening a ticket with our hosting vendor (OVH) a few minutes later and them claiming to have 24/7 support, nobody looked at our ticket until this morning when their phone support lines opened and I called them.

They've now replaced a defective power supply and we're back online, after ~26 hours of being offline. Some pretty disappointing response times, to put it nicely.

We're planning to move away from OVH at the end of this month, onto proper enterprise grade hardware that we own and control. This will give us a HUGE boost in server resources and allow us to scale for the foreseeable future, while also giving us the control to resolve problems like this much quicker. Expect another follow up post about this in the next couple weeks once I've put together the migration plan.

Timeline:

Jan 5th 10:03am PST - We get alerts to the server being non-responsive.
Jan 5th 10:05am PST - I pull up the console via IPMI and it's completely non-responsive. Attempting to power off / on the server or do anything, does not work.
Jan 5th 10:15am PST - Initial support ticket created with OVH. I followed up a couple times over the next few hours, and got no response.
Jan 6th 6:32am PST - Called OVH, gave them the case number and asked them to investigate
Jan 6th 7:34am PST - I get notified they'll start their "intervention" in 15 minutes.
Jan 6th 11:04am PST - Call them again, the tech is still working on it and they'll get back to me with an update
Jan 6th 11:34am PST - "I was informed by our data centre technician that there is an issue with the power supply unit for the rack on which your server resides. Your server will come back online once they have replaced the power supply."
Jan 6th 12:17pm PST - We're back up finally!

Edit on Jan 7th @ 8:40am PST: We just had another outage of about an hour. Investigating with OVH.

59 comments

Lemmy.ca goes down and the PM resigns just a few hours later, obviously it's all a conspiracy to bury the news ^/s
- I think this is causation. Trudeau must be an avid Lemmy.ca user and the stress of this instance being down pushed him over the edge.

Thank you for handling the issue :)
I can't count how many times I opened my Lemmy.ca bookmark out of habit during the outage 😬
- I kept thinking "I wonder how the Lemmy.ca outage is doing. I should get on and find ou-- oh yeah"
  
  In case your unaware: https://status.lemmy.ca/ has the server status and updates on outages.
- Same here ... I opened up my bookmark about a dozen times before I realized I should switch to my alt lemmy account.
  It's also made me realize that I should maintain an extra or a couple extra lemmy accounts for times like these.
  
  Yes you should! I was in a bit of a back and forth with someone and had to switch to my alt to continue (once I realized there was no ETA on the server getting fixed lol)

Make sure you figure out what kind of service credit you’re eligible for due to their SLA snafu. Over 24 hours to replace a simple power supply… what a bunch of jokers. OVH has gone downhill quite a bit over the years sadly.
- Yep, planning on it. It looks like we should qualify for one free month, which would be nice to make our migration a little easier.
- Not the server power supply per the notes above, but some component that supplies power to the rack. Perhaps the PDU, or other distribution components? Depending on the rack, it could take a couple of hours to replace, but certainly the ticket should have been picked up far earlier for service!
  
  Right you are. I missed that. Still, there should have been redundancy. Every DC worth their salt should have redundant PDUs connected to redundant circuits.
- Nice quality hardware they have. Not even redundant power supplies it seems to have, and no monitoring either. I’ll keep my distance from them.

Wow, that’s pretty shitty service, considering that renting a physical server is likely not a small client thing. I’m also floored that a rack PDU failure was not detected and acted upon more proactively by their datacenter operations team, and necessitated a ticket to be opened by you. OVH really does seem to be the Temu of colo/hosting providers. Yikes!
- They have a nice status page where you can see how many servers are down in a rack, I think that was a mis-comm between the tech + support since it only showed 1-2 down. No way a whole rack pdu failure should be down for that long.

I was following on status.lemmy.ca and saw that your hosting provider was OVH so I knew it could be a while.
I worked there a few years ago, as a "Customer Advocate", and although their infra is usually nice and affordable, it also comes with the major downside of having practically no support, and being at their mercy for any physical issue.
I remember trying to help people that didn't know about 'screen' and being told by my boss that I was there to help people with billing issues, not to do tech support. I could help with what was offered by OVH, like installing a new OS, but not tell people about screen. Every day we had reports with how many minutes we spent in the bathroom. Once I sent a meme to a co-worker and was warned that I could be fired for doing it again. It's one of the most horrible places I've worked; both for the customers and for the employees.
I still have a dedicated server with them and it's been trouble free for many years. However I'm aware that as soon as anything happens, I'll probably need to move my stuff somewhere else if time is of the essence.

I didn't know what to do with my hours at work. I was almost at the point of actually...working...gross.

Welcome back! I was looking into OVH but after this outage... Naaah.
- Same here!

Pretty piss-poor "24 hr. service" from OVH. We're an MSP and will make sure to steer clear of them for future projects.
Glad to see everything back however!
- Took them 24 hours to respond and 7 minutes to fix. Sounds like 24/7 service to me?
  
  Shit. I didn't read your comment as a joke initially and almost had a mini-rant about how we know if a server 3 provinces away is down for 5 minutes and go into a red alert.
  That was dumb of me. Carry on.

Ahhh been wanting to comment on the Troodoe shitstorm all day today. Super helpful that http://status.lemmy.ca/ kept us in the know.
Curious what the monthly price difference is going to be, before and after moving away from ovh.

Thank you for all your hard work and top notch comms, Lemmy.ca admin peeps. I spent the day at dbzer0, which is always fun, but happy to be back home!

Thanks for all your hard work!

[Opens lemmy the 20th time today] Ahhhhhhhhhhh, that's the stuff. I was entirely too productive!

Oh my. I do feel your pain. My Friendica instance was down at the same time as your Lemmy instance, for 2 days as well, except my issue was a corrupted database engine and corrupted database tables. Kindred spirits.
I'm glad you got it resolved!

Well, thanks to this outage, I got a pretty good understanding of how often I turn on my Lemmy app. It turns out to be a whole heck of a lot. Haha.
Glad things are back up and running and that you all have a path forward to mitigate this in the future.

Welcome back! OVH sucks, really happy to hear you're moving away from them!

We’re back home!

wb gl hf

I went back to using my .ee account during the downtime and had to see... shudder... Hexbear posts... I guess it was nice to see the clownshow hasn't changed at all

Any hosting you can recommend?
I need enterprise level hosting guaranteed in Canada and currently, our servers are on Rogers.
To say that Rogers is the fucking worst is an understatement as at this point I'm seriously considering the word "sabotage"
That does not include the fact that they're extremely overcharging for very low hardware specs, their support staff literally doesn't know nor care, even though were payong through the nose, and their "enterprise level" support literally means that they might look at your ticket within 5 business days and their SLA is "fuck you"
So with that in mind, and previous great experiences with ovh, I got myself a nice big fat OVH server for testing which is single handedly flying circles around 10 of our Rogers servers for a fraction of the cost of those servers at Rogers and so far its been awesome.
Not having a ticket looked at for 24 hours, however, is not possible for us, we need 24 support...
Anything you might be able to recommend?
- Unfortunately no recommendations unless you want colo space to run your own infra in. I'd avoid any large corp like Rogers or Telus.
  I'm sure ovh is fine if you have multiple servers and roll your own redundancy. You can also pay them for premium support.
- If you’re looking for a Canadian company, check out ThinkOn. I'm not sure if they offer what you want, but i know some our our government agencies use them.

Thank you! .... This has become my landing page on the internet so it's great to see you guys up again.
Thanks for all the work you guys do!

I was anxiously following the updates on status.lemmy.ca. Glad you guys are back online!

We are finally back!!! Thank you guys!!

Thanks for getting it back and all the work to keep it running!

yay ❤️

Phew! Welcome back!

I am simultaneously happy to see you're all back up and running again and mourning the loss of the sudden increase in productivity I had while you were down.

Happy new year!
They’ve now replaced a defective power supply and we’re back online, after ~26 hours of being offline.
It was a nice break from the firehose.

Good to see we are back

Thank you! Slow response from OVH - you'd think they'd have monitoring for that.

I’m curious what the new hosting setup will look like?
- What would it look like?
- Expect a post with details sometime in the next few weeks, once I stop procrastinating and start deploying things =)

Happy New Year and thank you for your hard work.

Thanks for the update, I was wondering what was going on.
Glad to hear you're getting your own hardware now. I offered before but again if you need any help I can offer up some free labour on the weekends. I am a net admin so if you need any help with networking or security give me a shout.