Dreamwidth Development

As mentioned in my last post, I will be taking the Dreamhack server down for maintenance in 30 minutes! I'll edit this post once it starts and again when it's back up.

10:04am BST: I have restricted logins to admins and am beginning the maintenance now. This will involve a reboot and some diagnostics before opening it back up.

10:58am BST: The maintenance is done, and logins are unrestricted again!

Apologies again for the delay on this - Dreamhack applications are now officially open again!

As I explained in my previous post (which you should read if you haven't already - there's a lot of info in there), anybody who wants a Dreamhack should apply through this form, even if you already had one before. I will, as a one-time thing, email everybody who had an account before to let them know that the service is back up and that they'll need to re-apply.

My apologies once again for the delay! If you find any issues with the service, please feel free to let me know.

The Dreamhack machine currently seems to be suffering from a performance issue where if you try to start your Apache, it might tell you that Apache failed to start. In reality, the Apache server *has* started, but the 'start-apache' script is timing out before Apache can report that fact.

If the last line of your Apache log file is:

NOTE: Google::Checkout::* Perl modules were not found.

then Apache has most likely started successfully. (This is a normal warning on Dreamhack machines; we haven't used the Google Checkout code for some time and thus the modules are not installed on the Dreamhack machine.) You can verify this by navigating to your Dreamhack's Web address.

We're investigating this at the moment. This might require a reboot of the Dreamhack machine in the near future; we'll post about it here if that's the case.

[edit: We're going to reboot the Dreamhack machine. I'll edit this post again when it's up.]

[edit 2: The Dreamhack machine is back up, and I've rolled out a new version of start-apache that can wait a bit longer if Apache doesn't start up immediately. It prints out a "Waiting for Apache to start" message, and then checks every second (for up to 6 seconds) whether Apache started, so it shouldn't slow things down for anybody.]

Hi,

Soon - probably within the next month - I'm planning to add code on the Dreamhack server which will automatically shut down Apache instances when the owner logs out (or at some point thereafter). I'm doing this because running Apache instances do take up resources on the Dreamhack server and a lot of people don't stop their Apache instances when they're not working on them, and it does make things a bit harder.

Currently I'm thinking of either shutting down the Apache instance either 7 days after the owner last logged out (unless they're currently logged in, of course) or shutting it down immediately on logout. If anybody has any issues with either of these options, please let me know in the comments - I'm very willing to listen to people on this.

If you have any other comments or questions, please do also comment. I'd be happy to answer any questions on this.

As a reminder, the Dreamhack machine is going to be taken offline at some time between 1am EDT and 6am EDT on April 28th for up to an hour, as the datacenter will be doing maintenance work!

You can use the links in the above paragraph to check when this is in your local timezone.

I'm just about to reboot the Dreamhack server. I'll update this post when it's done!

[edit 17:09 GMT: The server has been rebooted.]