Interesting Week

It’s been an interesting week at Hawk Host to say the least.  Even for me personally it’s been a tough week with various things going wrong.  I’m going to quickly run through my week and all that has happened.

The first annoyance for me this week has been the lack of two monitors.  One of my Viewsonic vx922’s stopped working to a point where it would not have anything on screen at all.  It turned out to be a syncing issue which meant it was shipped out under warranty to be fixed.  So I have been running with just one screen which has been tough especially when things are busy and I am trying to multi task.

The second thing has been the fact I now have a new computer chair.  You’d think that would be a good thing which it is except I am not used to it at all.  So I have been fidgeting around constantly trying to find that sweet spot.  This is especially tough when it’s a more ergonomic chair which means I need to sit properly when before I never used to.  It is good for me but sitting straight the majority of the time seems to be tough for me to get used to.

The third annoying thing to happen to me is my iphone no longer works.  It was getting progressively worse over the past month or so.  At first I was unable to receive calls when the phone was sleeping which it took me a while to realize that was happening.  It has now got to the point where it no longer can receive calls at all as it locks up when I try to answer a call.  It also is unable to make any calls as any call fails then I am without any signal until I reboot the phone.  Now keep in mind I have a full signal until I try to make a call and I confirmed there is a signal here by checking other phones with the same provider.  The good news is I have a new phone on the way as it is under warranty and it should hopefully arrive today.

Now onto what happened to Hawk Host.  Well in a strange occurrence one of our VPS nodes raid array became degraded which is supposed to be a non fatal problem.  Unfortunately for us it was not and required us to reboot it.  When it came back online something was not right there were a few VM’s which would not start up again.  It turns out there were some serious file system corruption for some users and only some and an fsck would not solve it.  It turned out there were bad stripes on the raid array which meant the machine was basically toast.  In order to solve the problem we’d need to rebuild the array which would mean wiping out the entire server.  We decided against this and crossed our fingers on having a new VPS node up to replace the machine and have everyone migrated over. We were able to migrate everyone over but it was not without its issues.  A bug in openvz caused arp requests to not be sent out when we migrated VPS’s across.  We did not find out why until everyone was moved over which meant lots more work earlier on while migrating everyone.  We did send the arp requests later on to solve the routing issues but it was a lot of time taken up on an issue that shouldn’t have been there.  We had everyone moved across in less than 24 hours though which is pretty awesome.  We were staring hardware failure in the face and we migrated everyone across very fast with almost no down time.  If we had lost the machine we had our backups of course but it’s always best to have almost no down time.

So it was an eventful week at Hawk Host to say the least.  Next week is probably going to be a slow week with everyone going on holidays and such.  The week of the 28th we plan on starting our migration over to LiteSpeed.  There will probably be an announcement about that before the end of this week.