WritheM Web Solutions

DNS Issues with the writhem.com subdomains

Michael Writhe — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:56:22 +0000

Teams are currently investigating an issue with dns resolution on most subdomains that point to our WM2-AB-CA site.

Scheduled Internet Maintenance at WM2-AB-CA

Michael Writhe — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 17:20:27 +0000

On the morning of Thursday Dec 1st at approximately 8am we will be conducting internet maintenance. We do not anticipate that any outages felt will be for very long, though we would like to advice our clients in advance. The outage will affect all servers hosted at WM2-AB-CA. Please be advised that websites are hosted at WM4-TX-US and will not be affected by this outage.

Flakey Service at WM2-AB-CA

Michael Writhe — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 14:44:55 +0000

Several outage notices have been sent over the last 30 minutes to the admin team from all services at WM2-AB-CA. The outages do not seem to be isolated to a single server or service, but instead the entire site. Network Teams are investigating a cause and possible solution. We apologize for any inconvenience that this outage may be causing.

RAID Degraded at WM2-AB-CA

Michael Writhe — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 19:42:55 +0000

As a preventative measure all services at the WM2-AB-CA Site have been suspended due to multiple hard drive failures that we experienced this morning. This affected the primary storage unit and put it into a degraded state. Replacement drives have been ordered and should be installed within the next few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your understanding.

Attack on Cerato

Michael Writhe — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 15:03:24 +0000

An attack was just identified on server cerato which hosts all major websites for WritheM. Although the attack consisted of multiple ip addresses, it appears to be directed at only the WritheM domains, and not our customers. As a precaution access to the affected scripts/website have been disabled. We apologize for any inconvenience this will cause to the WritheM Website (including but limited to the members area, billing area, and shopping carts).

WM2-AB-CA: Air Conditioning Unit / bluebox

Michael Writhe — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 13:14:55 +0000

As a result of a faulty Air Conditioning unit the temperatures in one of the server racks reached unbearable temperatures and has thermally damaged one of the servers. All services on bluebox, including varnish and VPN services are currently affected. We are working hard to restore services to alternate servers and a replacement air conditioning unit has been ordered. We apologize for any inconvenience this outage may cause you.

Scheduled Power Maintenance WM2-AB-CA

Michael Writhe — Thu, 12 May 2011 15:11:51 +0000

WritheM Web Solutions has been notified of an extended power outage window that will begin at 8am MTN tomorrow Friday, May 13th. This outage window will potentially last up to 7.5 hours and services hosted at our WM2-AB-CA site will be affected during the window. A maintenance window has been created and servers that are hosted on site will not be monitored for stability.

IMPERIUM: HDD Errors Currently being investigated

Michael Writhe — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 08:08:45 +0000

A disk corruption error on one of our Active Directory server’s hard drives is currently being investigated. Imperium started reporting RedoLog corruption errors earlier tonight and is currently offline. No external services should be affected other than Remote Desktop services, however users may experience issues with usernames and passwords for the duration of the outage.

Connection Issues at WM2-AB-CA

Michael Writhe — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 22:56:51 +0000

We are currently investigating a communication issue with our WM2-AB-CA Site. A Tech has been dispatched to investigate the source of the outage. We hope to be back on-line shortly. Servers that are affected by this outage include ludus, echelon, adamo, imperium, memoria, bluebox and offero. We apologize by this inconvenience and are working hard on this holiday day to remedy the situation as fast as possible.

Server: Adamo experiencing outages

Michael Writhe — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 04:41:41 +0000

Our Admin team is currently investigating an outage that has recently been reported regarding our Adamo server. This server hosts all media related services as well as acts as a media repository for the WritheM team.

Server migration from WM1-AB-CA to WM2-AB-CA

Michael Writhe — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 19:25:17 +0000

Today will begin an extended outage that will pull all but the cerato server offline for at least a day. Our staff are currently migrating the server equipment from one site to another. Among other upgrades the new site is expected to much faster. Thank you for your patience during this outage.

Router Maintenance at WM1-AB-CA

Michael Writhe — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 16:59:12 +0000

We are installing a new router at our main Calgary Site today. This will be the first step towards migrating our primary data centre in Calgary from WM1-AB-CA to WM2-AB-CA. Next week there will be additional network outages at WM1-AB-CA as we migrate the servers and equipment to our new site. Thank you for your patience with this and we apologize for any inconveniences this will cause you.

CertAuthority needing Maintenance

Michael Writhe — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 15:24:52 +0000

Immediate maintenance will be performed on our Certificate Authority server. Imperium may experience intermittent issues while the maintenance is performed as several server reboots may be required. The issue has arisen that certificates without templates cannot be submitted unless submitted through the IIS Interface, which was never installed. A reconfigure of the CertAuth to allow the request of certificates via the IIS Interface will be performed.

Monitoring software receiving upgrade. May report outages.

Michael Writhe — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 14:28:24 +0000

For the next hour or so some services may fire warnings about being unavailable for short periods of time. This is incorrect as we are just upgrading the monitoring software and not the services themselves. No outages are expected during this time.

Large scale maintenance at site: WM1-AB-CA

Michael Writhe — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 18:00:45 +0000

We are migrating our current Windows VMWare environment to an VMWare ESXi environment and expect major extended outages on some services. Migration will commence on the weekend of July 31st and will continue for upwards of a week for less essential services. With the exception of cerato all other servers will be replaced by a new one in the coming weeks. Click read more for more information about the migration.

UAT Offline for the Holiday Season

Michael Writhe — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 22:39:58 +0000

UAT has been taken offline for the christmas season. As production has been rolled out successfully, the site will be used as a future development platform only. We will continue to provide a UAT environment for all future enhancement, however over the holiday change freeze we will not be needing it.

RAID Array Maintenance – Expected Outage

Michael Writhe — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:21 +0000

Disc 4 of the Oden Array will be replaced with a new hard drive tonight starting at 8:30pm MTN. Downtimes could exceed 1 hour on all echelon, compello, mediabox, and sandbox services, to allow replacement and rebuild of the array. These include:

Vacation Alert

Michael Writhe — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:48:58 +0000

I’ll be going on vacation to Europe starting on October 2nd, and will return Oct 18th.
If you require assistance please use the contact form as normal, and if urgent one of our admin’s will pick up the email. Otherwise I will respond once I return. Thanks very much everyone!

Chess set that is ready for war!

Michael Writhe — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 02:04:00 +0000

If you’ve ever lost at chess to me (because nobody has ever won… except my grandfather) than you’ll know that I enjoy sweet looking chess sets. I actually have a chess board as the coffee table between my couches in my home theatre room. Then on a completely unrelated note, you may or may not know that I really like medieval times. That being said, I think I’ve found the sweetest and most creative chess set ever made. Dude who made it had some serious patience to put this thing together though… I wonder if I can commission him to make me one in a week. Hmmm.. Hey Dan, did you want a chess rematch next week? You might win this time… (not likely). Hit the jump for the full gallery and a link to the artists story. Thanks to Bill for heads up on the story.

Artisticly Delicious – Pie Suckers.

Michael Writhe — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 20:36:17 +0000

The crazy cooks over at Luxirare have outdone themselves this time. What happens when you mix my favourite dessert with a lollipop? Nothing short of genius! Check out the almost artistic pictures and a link to the full gallery after the break…