Another kernel panic. If there's one thing that's reliable about this machine it's the clock-like precision with which it produces kernel panics, roughly every 20 days.
Hot on the heels of the server maintenance (an operating system update) earlier today we have an application-level update to the software that powers this website. Should only be down for a few minutes. Please report any anomalies you find using the issue tracker.
Update: We're back.
The website and other services will be going down shortly for maintenance. Downtime should hopefully be only a few minutes or less, while the server reboots and comes back online.
Update: The server is now back up and I'm performing checks to make sure everything is operating correctly.
Another kernel panic.
Yet another kernel panic.
Another kernel panic.
The server will be going down for minor maintenance at approximately 12:20 PM EDT today (Sunday 28 September 2008). Service should be interrupted only for a couple minutes while the server is rebooting.
Update: [50 minutes later] The server is now back up. Although the initial phase of the reboot went as quickly as expected (the usual 60 seconds), the system insisted on doing a forced fsck (File System Check) which ended up delaying things by about 30 minutes before the network interfaces and services came back online. For those of you who are interested in the technical details of the update process, and information about why such a long-running fsck might be triggered, see, "Updating the kernel to version 2.6.18-92.1.13.el5 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1".
Update 2: [6 hours later] It has come to my attention that email services didn't come back up after booting due to a misconfiguration (not detected previously because this was actually the first reboot for this server, ever); this has now been fixed. If you've tried to contact me you may have seen temporary delivery failures during the intervening period, but most likely your mail transfer agent will retry automatically for you without any intervention on your part.
Another kernel panic, again on application launch (the same app has now kernel panicked four times on me).
Just saw last month's Netcraft web server survey and was pleased to see that nginx has cemented it's fifth-place spot with a solid 2.4 million hosts in (survey link). This is of interest to me because nginx is the HTTP server that powers this site (at least, the new Rails-backed portions of the site).
Another kernel panic, this time on application launch (the same app has now kernel panicked three times on me). With this failure the venerable iMac smashes (downwards) through the 20-day barrier for "time between failures".
