SmugMug weekly maintenance window: Thursday night / Friday morning

Wireless · March 30, 2006

SmugMug's weekly scheduled maintenance window is Thursday nights from 2200 Pacific to Friday morning 0300 Pacific.

We totally understand, downtime isn't fun, and you just might be one of the few that's up in the wee hours of the morning uploading photos. Unfortunately, there are cases in which we really need a time to bring the site down to perform various tasks and upgrade systems. This is one of the low points of the day/week, and it also coincides with our marathon feature testing/release night! We apologize if this impacts you.

Hopefully this gives you two gifts: Some extra sleep, and some new features to play with when you wake up all rested the next morning.

We will do our best to keep the work within the window, and we'll post to DGrin Thursday afternoon that we're going to be working that evening. Not all weeks will have new features or a need to perform maintenance.

The old Maintenance thread is here: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=2161

TIME CHART

10pm PST (California, USA) converts to these times locally

Time chart can be found at timeanddate.com.

onethumb · May 24, 2007

May 24th Maintenance
Hey all,

We expect to take the site down for a big feature release tonight during our normal maintenance window, assuming testing continues to go well. It'll likely be offline for the entire duration of our normal maintenance window.

We are going to try something new tonight. If it doesn't work, please don't kill me, but we're gonna try to put the site into 'Read Only' mode so people can still browse your photos, see them embedded out on the net, etc.

But that means you won't be able to upload new photos, log in, edit captions, leave comments, etc. Only view. There will be a big notice on the top of each page letting you know the site is currently undergoing maintenance, is in read-only mode, and may go offline at any time.

There will probably be a few minutes here and there where the site may not be as speedy, but if this test goes well, it should remain mostly online throughout maintenance.

Wish us luck!

jfriend · May 24, 2007

onethumb wrote:

We are going to try something new tonight. If it doesn't work, please don't kill me, but we're gonna try to put the site into 'Read Only' mode so people can still browse your photos, see them embedded out on the net, etc.

Kudos for moving to a read-only update where the site keeps serving images during maintenace! That's a great move. I hope it works well tonight.

rainforest1155 · May 24, 2007

Don,

that sounds like a great maintenance feature, especially for us Europeans over here that get hit the complete Friday morning.

I'm staying tuned to the release as well.

All the best,
Sebastian

onethumb · May 25, 2007

onethumb wrote:

Hey all,

We expect to take the site down for a big feature release tonight during our normal maintenance window, assuming testing continues to go well. It'll likely be offline for the entire duration of our normal maintenance window.

We are going to try something new tonight. If it doesn't work, please don't kill me, but we're gonna try to put the site into 'Read Only' mode so people can still browse your photos, see them embedded out on the net, etc.

But that means you won't be able to upload new photos, log in, edit captions, leave comments, etc. Only view. There will be a big notice on the top of each page letting you know the site is currently undergoing maintenance, is in read-only mode, and may go offline at any time.

There will probably be a few minutes here and there where the site may not be as speedy, but if this test goes well, it should remain mostly online throughout maintenance.

Wish us luck!

We didn't finish testing in time, so we're waiting until next week.

Enjoy SmugMug tonight, everyone.

rainforest1155 · May 25, 2007

onethumb wrote:

We didn't finish testing in time, so we're waiting until next week.

Enjoy SmugMug tonight, everyone.

That's alright! We better have a properly tested release than a buggy one and still can wait another week. This also gives you maybe a little time to relax your bleeding eyes.
I overslept the maintenance period anyways and I'm glad that I didn't miss the new read-only feature!

Sebastian

Andy · May 1, 2008

Site Maintenance tonight, May 1st @ 10pm
During our normal weekly scheduled maintenance window tonight, we’ll be making some database architecture changes.

We hope and anticipate that the site will remain up the entire time, though it may go into read-only mode for a short while. In the event we have to take the site offline, we’ll do everything we can to minimize the downtime.

Read About it, here

And subscribe to the feed of that blog to see be notified in the future, as well

DrDavid · May 1, 2008

Andy wrote:

During our normal weekly scheduled maintenance window tonight, we’ll be making some database architecture changes.

Is this just to do with the N levels galleries? Or, is there something else more exciting? Like COUPON CODES, PACKAGES and/or Analytics plug-in? :ivar Perhaps something even more super-duper like AJAX based drag and drop gallery layout, etc..?

David

pilotdave · May 1, 2008

Oh bringing back an old thread containing "Hopefully this gives you two gifts: Some extra sleep, and some new features to play with when you wake up all rested the next morning" was just WRONG! Ya had me all excited till I read the date on it. Hope it's not just a behind the scenes database thing that we won't notice...

Dave

DrDavid · May 22, 2008

Is tonight going to be new-features Thursday?

hrgphoto · June 12, 2008

is it down again tonight? I do not see any photos and using the urls do not get me anywhere.. hope it's up again soon! I love smugmug!

Edit:
it's up again yeah!

Andy · June 19, 2008

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=97260

dogwood · August 8, 2008

So I'm getting the read-only message. Any idea how long that will be? I don't see anything about maintenance today in this thread and didn't get a message about it.

I do realize it is smack right in the middle of the weekly maintenance time and that was poor planning on my part. Just wish I had known about the maintenance or read-only mode in advance.

rainforest1155 · August 8, 2008

dogwood wrote:

So I'm getting the read-only message. Any idea how long that will be? I don't see anything about maintenance today in this thread and didn't get a message about it.

I do realize it is smack right in the middle of the weekly maintenance time and that was poor planning on my part. Just wish I had known about the maintenance or read-only mode in advance.

Sorry for the hassle. You could expect a maintenance to happen every week during our scheduled window, then you would be on the safe side in terms of planning. More info on all maintenances when they do happen can be found on our wordpress blog.

Sebastian

Andy · September 12, 2008

Reminder, we update here too: http://smugmug.wordpress.com/

Matthew Saville · September 12, 2008

Andy wrote:

Reminder, we update here too: http://smugmug.wordpress.com/

Yargh, right in the middle of a 227 megabyte upload and emailing three clients to tell them their pics were online.

Oh well, you win some you lose some! Git 'er done, guys!

=Matt=

PrimeTime · September 26, 2008

SmugMug Weekly Maintenance 9-25 @ 10 PM PST
Sorry for the short notice. We're going to have to take the site offline for a few hours to make some changes to our core switches.

We don't anticipate the site being offline for more then a few hours.

Apologize for the inconvenience.

PrimeTime
SmugMug Server Surgeon

Andy · September 26, 2008

We'll be using the window tonight, folks, to install some new hardware. Updates will be posted here and on our status updates blog http://smugmug.wordpress.com

darryl · September 26, 2008

Andy wrote:

We'll be using the window tonight, folks, to install some new hardware. Updates will be posted here and on our status updates blog http://smugmug.wordpress.com

It's a shame that Dgrin was down during the same time. Yes, I know that's why you have the blog. Yes, I subscribe to the blog.

- Andy's blog update was at 9:56PM PDT.
- I happened to notice at 10:43PM PDT (I was trying to write some docs for parents at my son's preschool on how to use AlbumFetcher).
- FeedBlitz sent me a notice at 11:24PM PDT that SmugMug was down.

Yeah, so much for a blog being the solution to downtime notification.

So yes, this was during your weekly maintenance window. I suppose we've been lulled into complacency because uptime has been so good, and usually maintenance just means a red box at the top of every page (read-only mode), or worst-case, a cartoon with servers in the desert.

This time, it was this nasty error message:

Internal Server Error - Read
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Reference #3.6b41a45.1222407709.1e68652

And what really gets me is that while SmugMug has time and time again said they will not send e-mails with outage notices, I was surprised to get this e-mail just last week from news@smugmug.com:

Subject: [SmugMug] Quick News: Yo ho! Ye have metallic prints and more to sell...
From: news@smugmug.com
X-Mailer: SmugMug v1.0

On International Talk Like a Pirate Day ( http://www.talklikeapirate.com/ ) , the good Ship SmugMug stashed extra treasure in the hold. Landlubbers won't be seeing it until ye set yer prices, so cast your eyes on the booty ( http://smugmug.com/prints/catalog.mg ) and make some extra doubloons. Yarrr!

---
See more news items: http://www.smugmug.com/news/

SmugMug hates spam as much as you do. You opted-in to receive News updates, but if you don't want them anymore, no worries. Just click here: https://secure.smugmug.com/homepage/settings.mg?settings=mail

OMG, I would so prefer to get notices about last-minute "hard" outages like this than what's new in the store.

Ah well, least now Dgrin is back up so I can whine about it somewhere. :-}

GSPeP · September 26, 2008

Aha, it was maintenance.

Because Smugmug as well as Dgrin were down, I was already thinking of earthquakes etc.

Glad you're back online.

jiri · September 26, 2008

is smugmug down?
I cannot access home smugmug site nor my own site, this is the error message i get

 
An error occurred while processing your request. 
Reference #97.4c959d50.1222415307.3b18eb4

thank you
jiri

Furono · September 26, 2008

Server down browser page displays error
Could you have something other than the following message display? This look bad to people trying to access. Thanks.

"
Internal Server Error - Read

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Reference #3.eb41a45.1222415738.1c233a9

"
or

"Gateway Timeout

The proxy server ..........

"

Daddio · September 26, 2008

darryl wrote:

OMG, I would so prefer to get notices about last-minute "hard" outages like this than what's new in the store.

+1 on that! Please consider letting people "opt in" to email notification for outages.

Richard · September 26, 2008

jiri wrote:
I cannot access home smugmug site nor my own site, this is the error message i get
 
An error occurred while processing your request. 
Reference #97.4c959d50.1222415307.3b18eb4 
 
 
thank you
jiri

Yes, for scheduled maintenance.

robertodenis · September 26, 2008

I can t access my site
Hello!

I dont have any idea of what s going on. My pics disappeared. I tried to find some information. I just read this " Power and Pro users with Custom Domains take note!! - Changes needed" but I dont understand anything.

Can you help? Thank you

RD

www.robertodenis.name

Matthew Saville · September 26, 2008

robertodenis wrote:

Hello!

I dont have any idea of what s going on. My pics disappeared. I tried to find some information. I just read this " Power and Pro users with Custom Domains take note!! - Changes needed" but I dont understand anything.

Can you help? Thank you

RD

www.robertodenis.name

Smugmug weekly maintenance window!

http://www.digitalgrin.com/showthread.php?t=30979

=Matt=

Matthew Saville · September 26, 2008

Andy wrote:

We'll be using the window tonight, folks, to install some new hardware. Updates will be posted here and on our status updates blog http://smugmug.wordpress.com

BTW Andy when is the decision made to go down and who makes it? I'm assuming it's before 9:50 PM Thursday?

I'd really like to get an email at 5-6 PM on the Thursdays you think you might need to use the window.

Also, the error message tonight is especially nasty. Can we at least get the cartoon instead of the death-screen? You're getting a few new topics from users who are confused about such a "severe" appearance...

[edit @ 3 AM.] ...there we go, got the "window browsing mode" finally. Wish I could do some overnight uploading too, but it's all good! Just culled four events and processed three, I'm headin' to bed!

=Matt=

MRudland · September 26, 2008

Is it still down?
Michelle

Andy · September 26, 2008

Hi Folks, we're sorry that the maintenance window's being used for longer than normal. Hopeful to have things back up soon! Stay tuned here.

FINAO · September 26, 2008

MRudland wrote:

Is it still down?
Michelle

I believe so... I can see my pictures, but can't do anything with them. I'm also unable to login.

It would be real nice if they could post a solid time when the site will be back up.

This banner has been at the top of the site for the past 5+ hours:

"The Sorcerers of Smug are adding new magic right now, so we're in window shopping mode. You can view all the photos you like, but for a few minutes we're unable to sell prints or take new photos or comments. Stay tuned! The SmugMug team"

Andy · September 26, 2008

darryl wrote:

OMG, I would so prefer to get notices about last-minute "hard" outages like this than what's new in the store.

Sending the emails is not a trivial thing, but I'd love it if we could. I know the Ops guys would, too. We can't always do that. I'll run a few more ideas by the guys after things settle down today.

For the SmugMug Status Update Blog, I don't have good solution to the feedburner email lag, does anyone?

We've been talking about that here, too. I do know that if you have subscribed to the feed in your [URL="htp://www.google.com/reader"]feed reader[/URL], you'll have it as soon as we post it.

SmugMug weekly maintenance window: Thursday night / Friday morning

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