Wikis Down!

Hi! We did have an outage Tuesday from 3:55pm PDT (11:55pm GMT) to 5:14pm PDT (1:14am GMT) due to systemic power loss at our colocation provider -- several other companies were also affected. For all but about ten minutes of this window, a message was displayed to users indicating that the system was down. This was a very unusual occurrence.

There were no interruption issues yesterday, so it's possible that there was some issue with traffic between your location in the UK and our servers. Next time you see an issue like that could you run a traceroute?

Hi, I am in the UK and receving this message:
"This PBwiki is temporarily offline for maintenance, and will return shortly. We're working behind the scenes to restore service as soon as possible. If you feel you've reached this message in error, please contact support@pbwiki.com"

It looks like my wiki is blank!
Please can you tell me when service is restored.

My wiki is still down please can someone help me!
we cannot work - its been down for 24 hours now...
this is not good.

I am having problems today with my wiki (yes the same one as before) being intermittently fine, and then broken.

I have done a traceroute and it looks like all the hops are fine until so-2-1-0.mpr1.sjc2.above.net (64.125.26.229) which maps to San Jose, CA according to GeoTrace (http://www.nabber.org/projects/geotrace). That makes me think that, on this occassion at least, the issue is at the PBWiki end.

Have you any ideas as to what the problem is/has been or resolutions for this?

The wiki seems to be working at the moment again btw - this is because it has taken me an hour to post this properly on GetSatisfaction which was also down for a long while (haven't been able to track where that problem was occurring though).

This seems to have happened again - my wiki is down as is the pbwiki page so I have no access to information about what's happening. Get Satisfaction was also unavailable earlier though so I am hopeful the problem will be resolved soon.

Is there any way that information about system outages can be transmitted? I am assuming this is not scheduled and am wondering if there is any way that basic system outage (scheduled and not) messages can be made available from a site hosted elsewhere (and therefore not prone to the same power outages etc)?

Hi! We did have a network problem on New Year's Eve for a few minutes, but we had no such problem yesterday. I'm not sure what the issue is - more traceroutes may help us figure out if there's something particularly strange about our ISP's peering with your ISP.

http://blog.pbwiki.com/ is hosted completely separately from the main PBwiki service, so you should always be able to reach it. We do post there if there are issues with the service.

Thanks for this. The problem was earlier today (around 10.30am UK time) and it seemed to resolve itself in about 40 mins. It is possible that there was some sort of ISP issue for a short while - is this possible to check after the fact or would I need to have chased that whilst I was having problems accessing the wiki?

I have noted that the blog is independently hosted in case of any future problems.

This same problem seems to be occurring again this morning. I am wondering if it's a network load issue as it is around the same time of day (yesterday it was from 10.30am ish for about half an hour. Today we've noticed the problem at 10.51am) so I am looking into this at our end. The rest of the web seems to be fine which does make me wonder if it could be a temporary load issue specific to pbwiki?

The message I am receiving is:

"Network Timeout

The operation timed out when attempting to contact suncatest.pbwiki.com.
The requested site did not respond to a connection request and the browser has stopped waiting for a reply.
* Could the server be experiencing high demand or a temporary failure? Try again later.
* Are you unable to browse other sites? Check the computer's network connection.
* Is your computer or network protected by a firewall or proxy? Incorrect settings can interfere with Web browsing.
* Still having trouble? Consult your network administrator or Internet provider for assistance."

I also have no luck when I try pinging pbwiki from the command prompt - I receive a request timed out message at every stage. Pinging other sites is successful which is why it doesn't appear to be a local issue for us (or a problem with international connections as other US based sites are working) but perhaps a general routing issue and/or possibly a loading/connection/routing issue at or near your end?

I can tell you that we're seeing no networking issues on our side and have not had other reports of slowdowns or outages. So it's a wee baffling. The next time you see this, can email a report with the full traceroute to support@pbwiki.com?

David,

Thanks for that. I will do that if it happens again. It may be a problem outside either my organization or pbwiki's control. I spoke to our network people today and they think it may be a network issue possibly outside of the University (in which my team is based) and/or possibly related to a dodgy router somewhere between us and you. PBWiki came back again after about 90 mins so I'm sure if others were having problems they would have reported an outage of that length. That makes me think it is a relatively local issue here. Should the same thing happen tomorrow though I'll send through a traceroute just in case... Tracking this stuff down is proving to be problematic as the problem itself is rather erratic!

Thanks,
Nicola.

David,

A slightly inconclusive update here but it may be of use to any other PBWiki users based in UK Higher Education or Further Education institutions. Although the wiki access looked like a PBWiki issue earlier this week more sites have subsequently been effected and wider reports have been received of connection problems.

The network problems now appear to be either at a high network level and probably outside the UK. The problem is now being investigated by JANET (the high speed HE network for the UK) and is therefore definitely a wider, and eccentrically variable, fault.

Many thanks for your help, apologies for assuming this was a PBWiki issue and I hope this extra info is of potential use to other UK HE/FE PBWiki users who may also have been having problems this week.

Thanks,
Nicola