Some brief downtime can be expected on Tuesday due to some hardware upgrades being made. We will let you know the exact time as soon as the technicians at the data centre in Docklands notify us.
Should be no more than a few minutes.
Thanks
Gazza
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Some brief downtime can be expected on Tuesday due to some hardware upgrades being made. We will let you know the exact time as soon as the technicians at the data centre in Docklands notify us.
Should be no more than a few minutes.
Thanks
Gazza
One upgrade was carried out on Tuesday but not the main one I've been waiting for, the upgrade to our database servers, this was not carried out due to unforseen technical difficulties.
We will be doing this now this coming Monday as well as installing a new server to replace the one that died about 2 weeks ago. So Monday may see a few minutes of interruption but will get us up and running at full speed.
Gazza
Apologies for the downtime today. We had to bring forward the re-indexing of our auctions to this morning, something that was planned for middle of the night action.
Users will now find that more words can be searched for that were before ignored.
Gazza
We are currently having problems with our image server, so you may see a few empty images for a short time while we get to the bottom of it.
Gazza
Following on from our trouble today with our image server, we have moved to our backup image server while we find what went wrong. Auctions images have started to re-appear and all should be back with us by lunchtime Monday (BST).
Our sincere apologies for any inconvenience caused.
Gazza
I'm afraid my estimation was a little optimistic, due to the severe nature of the crash we are having to move all the images over a very slow connection and as you an imagine there are hundreds of thousands of photos moving. They are coming back all the time and we should be totally back up to date tonight.
Measures are already in place so that this will not happen again.
Our sincere apologies once again.
Gazza
Our apologies for the unannounced downtime this afternoon. We have been having a few unwanted visitors to the site today. All is now back to normal.
Gazza
Our apologies for the extended down time this morning, we ran a software update to add a few new features but it proved to be alot slower than we had anticipated.
You might see a few pizza boxes around the site for a few minutes, this is due to us changing the location of our images to allow for easier backing up of all your photos.
I'll list the changes in the News forum in a mo.
Gazza
Most of you will have noticed we ran into some major problems. Although we are not happy with any downtime whatsoever, this was quite a major glitch with our database system and I'm glad to say the redundancy systems we had in place kept this down to about 25% of what it would have been only a couple of months ago. We are working to improve this all the time and apologise for any inconvenience caused.
Gazza
We'll be going down for about 45 minutes at 5am BST on 13th May for some routine maintenance.
Thanks
Gazza
The site will see some downtime tonight after 8pm BST whilst we add some more RAM to 5 of our hardest working servers.
Total downtime shouldnt be more than 45 minutes, we will try to do as late as possible to cause the least inconvenience but are limited to the time slots the data centre can give us.
Thanks
Gazza
A tiny percentage of IE6 (Internet Explorer Version 6) users may have some access problems today.
As a temporary solution we would recommend using Firefox http://www.getfirefox.com , this is eBid's favoured browser, a 3 minute download and install.
Alternatively an upgrade to IE7 will fix the problems.
Most users with IE6 won't find any problems at all. We apologise to those users who do find they have access problems. Access will be restored as soon as we are able to.
Gazza
We will see around 15 minutes of site downtime at 3.40pm (BST) today to fix a problem with some auction feedbacks.
Gazza
A tiny percentage of IE6 (Internet Explorer Version 6) users may have some access problems today.
As a temporary solution we would recommend using Firefox http://www.getfirefox.com , this is eBid's favoured browser, a 3 minute download and install.
Alternatively an upgrade to IE7 will fix the problems.
Most users with IE6 won't find any problems at all. We apologise to those users who do find they have access problems. Access will be restored as soon as we are able to.
Gazza
Some live auction pages will be inaccessible today for around 15 minutes at about 2pm (BST).
Our apologies for this, a small repair is required to some auction data.
Gazza
The access restrictions for the handful of IE6 users having problems are still in place and will be relaxed the second we are able to lift them.
Again we recommend upgrading to the current version of Internet Explorer or for greater speed when using eBid we highly recommend using Firefox http://www.getfirefox.com
Gazza
The access restrictions for the handful of IE6 users having problems were lifted but have again had to be put in place due to matters beyond our control.
Again we recommend upgrading to the current version of Internet Explorer or for greater speed when using eBid we highly recommend using Firefox http://www.getfirefox.com
Gazza
The IE6 access restrictions are in place due to a DoS attack that has been ongoing for a few weeks now. Now that we know the attacks are not sinister in their make up I can explain a little more.
Each browser has its own signature that helps us determine who is using what, IE6, IE7, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Safari, Opera etc. There is one signature that has been hitting us in huge spurts for around a month now and in order to keep the site online we have had to ban this one signature. The problem is that this signature is also used by a tiny handful of users still using IE6. For this reason a few users have been unable to gain access to eBid.
The browser signature is
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
Not all IE6 users are affected, only the ones with this exact signature. If you have any toolbars or addons added to your IE6 then this will differ the signature.
It turns out that the huge spike in hits comes from some anti virus software AVG, it is using this signature and pretending to be a human when checking for mailicous websites. Instead of doing good they are doing a great deal of harm by hammering sites, bringing them down, increasing bandwidth spend etc.
Here is more about it.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06...raffic_as_ie6/
So until we find another way to decipher AVG from human users with this browser signature or AVG decide to fix the problem themselves we are forced to keep it blocked.
I hope this explains the situation and as to why I haven't been able to explain it up until now.
Gazza
We will be updating the Forbidden message with a more useful message later today.
You can see what your browser signature is on this page.
http://www.ebid.net/useragent.php
If it matches Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) then we are currently unable to allow access.
Our apologies once more.
Gazza
IE6 users who have been seeing the forbidden message should now have full access to eBid.
Gazza
We've had a few major headaches since 4am this morning. Not only 1 but, 2 power supplies decided to die on us within minutes of each other and have caused a handful of problems with our whole hosting system.
Our backup procedures are currently running whilst we replace the required parts.
Our apologies for the inconvenience.
Gazza
We'll be going down on Wenesday 3rd Sept morning at 6am BST (London). This is for database upgrading. Due to the size of our databases nowadays any changes take a while so we could be down for up to 2 hrs.
Gazza
Well that was fun! We've finished our upgrade now, things should be alot smoother than they have been for the last few weeks.
Thanks,
Gazza
We'll be having our last piece of downtime for the forseeable future this morning for about 30 minutes to make the final changes needed to allow us to accept new members from a greater number of countries. This will be happening in about 10 minutes.
Thanks for your patience.
Gazza
18.26
10 minutes emergency downtime to repair some auction data.
We'll be taking the site down at 8am on Saturday 20th (BST) for about an hour to make some efficiency changes to the database.
That'l be 3am on the East Coast and Midnight in Cali.
Make the most of it!
Gazza
The site will be going down for about 90 minutes on Sunday (5th) morning around 8am (London) for some more database efficiency updates. This should help speed up keyword searches and individual auction page loads.
Gazza
We will be going down on Thursday morning at about 7am (UK). The downtime is to run the updates that should have been added on Sunday. We had problems Sunday with our internet connection and had to abort.
Down time will be around 2 hours.
Our apologies for this but it is an essential step to making eBid faster and more stable. We are currently handling double the daily users of a year ago and expect this to grow even more rapidly from now on.
Gazza
Our apologies for the current downtime. We are having a years worth of problems in a week at the moment.
As long as the problem is not hardware related we will be back in a few minutes.
We understand the frustrations, multiply them by 1000 and you will be getting close to what we are feeling here at the moment.
Gazza
There will be about 1 minute downtime at about 1.30pm (UK) today as we install new changes.
Gazza
The site will be down to install some new hardware at around 2pm this afternoon. Downtime will be about 10 minutes.
Thanks
Gazza
Some small photos will be missing for then next hour. These will return. This is due to a change in our hardware structure.
Gazza
We've finally pinpointed a bug that has been causing us all sorts of problems for the site for the last 3 weeks. For the next hour or so eBid Store categories will not be deleteable whilst we fix this.
Gazza
Users might experience a couple of seconds of downtime this afternoon while we upload some new software to eradicate the problem we've been having for the last few weeks.
Gazza
Users may experience a few seconds of downtime around 12 midday GMT whilst we upgrade some software.
Gazza
Couple of minutes downtime at around 9.15am (GMT) today to fix a database error.
Gazza
eBid will be going down for a major backend software update at 6am on Saturday 6th December (GMT).
We will be making some major non-cosmetic changes to our systems which will require a long period of outage. 3hrs will be our shortest estimate but it could go for most of the morning depending on any bumps along the way.
Our apologies for this for this but it is a necessary step for our future scalability and reliability.
Thanks,
Gazza
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UPDATE
This update has been put back a couple of days, we will let you know definite date v.soon.
We've had an unplanned outage this morning some of you will have been receiving error pages when using some parts of the site.
This has now been fixed. The cause is as yet new and unknown and is currently being investigated.
Our apologies for this.
Gazza
The re-scheduled downtime from 6th December will now take place tomorrow (Wednesday 10th) at 6am GMT
We will be making some major non-cosmetic changes to our systems which will require a long period of outage. 3hrs will be our shortest estimate but it could go for most of the morning depending on any bumps along the way.
Our apologies for this for this but it is a necessary step for our future scalability and reliability.
Thanks,
Gazza
Backing up before we started took us a lot longer than planned. Better to be safe than sorry though.
We hope to be back up early afternoon GMT
Thanks,
Gazza