And we’re back …

Oooh, so that’s what the big shiny red button do.

Frequent visitors of this website may have wittingly discovered the somewhat lack of website over the past few weeks. Firstly, I would like to apologize if you were in any way traumatized by the outage.

I was planning to blame Amazon S3 for the downtime but that might be a little unfair because I actually don’t use their service. Blaming other people is always fun.

The slightly more boring truth is that a server software update corrupted the kernel (yes the server runs Linux) whilst I was in Denmark on holiday celebrating my team’s first-prize win in Microsoft’s Imagine Cup world finals in Paris (more about that later). Needless to say the fun I was having outweighed my desire to fix the server. Some of you may have even witnessed the fun I had discovering my inner-Pirate from a placeholder photo in the past couple of days (credit to my Denmark host and server operator for the captions).

Now everything is back to normal, sort of.

41 insightful thoughts

  1. Hey there mister Zheng, so what have you been up to lately? Your site was down for quite a while 🙂

    Good that you found that big shiny red button 😀

  2. Woohoo.
    I don’t get it. Shiny red button? I thought you messed up your kernels.

  3. Messed up kernels (in plural)? What gives? Are you running this website on the devils os (Linux)? If so; why is there a problem, I’ve been lead to believe that Linux is close to perfect and that it never fails…

  4. What was the deal with the Viking photo when the server was back, but before the website came live?

    I thought you moved the Taskforce to another site. I was trying to email you but couldn’t find your email address.

  6. Any link to the placeholder image? I saw a really downscaled copy in one of my Speed Dial buttons.

  10. Claudio Cilia: why on earth do you “visit” the site every day? RSS Feed ftw! 🙂
    I was missing the updates from Long, but I’ve only been to the site a few times…

  11. What Long fails to mention is that it was his insistence we be running bleeding edge software that caused the thing to blow up in the first place 😛

    Tried to warn him…would he listen? Oooh no!

  13. @Luke: I was not aware updating a software package could corrupt a kernel. I guess this is what you call experience.

  15. True Long, very true. Nothing short of a kernel upgrade should corrupt a kernel. Anyhoo, shouldn’t happen again, and even if it does, there are contingencies in place to prevent prolonged downtime in future.

  16. @Luke: Oh good. Please share them with me some time 😛
    (For those who haven’t figured it out, Luke is the server admin)

  19. Having forgotten what you looked like (I saw the About page ages ago), I posted to blog that your website had been taken down by “some punk H4x0r” (the photo of you as a viking)

  29. @JoeM: Very funny 😛 I’ve deployed 2k8 on a number of servers and I’m still not totally convinced it’s stable enough for production use. It’s good, no doubt, but the first and second deployments crashed repeatedly until I had to give up and go with 2k3 instead (which is rock-solid on the same hardware). Sure, it’s likely down to crappy drivers, but nevertheless it was unusable for us in those situations. With that said I’m currently studying for my MCITP in Server 2008 administration. At least it’s stable enough on Virtual PC 🙂

  31. Way to get the site back up ;-). I with my limited knowledge of stuff thought that you might have lost the “right” to your domain name or something lol.

    Anyway, awesome job with the Cup, that’s seriously amazing.

  32. I was traumatized. I think I checked this site more after I realized it was gone than before.

    The saying is true…you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

  33. Phew!
    Got scared there for a moment.

    Thought Sinofsky had you abducted or something. 😉

    Welcome back.

  34. I thought that was the end! Thank goodness the website is back up and running, I was getting worried 😉
    Anyways, welcome back!!

  36. I gather you were insisting on running the latest Linux kernel instead of the stable one?

    Since you also happen to be a Microsoft enthusiast, why don’t you try Windows Server 2008? No CALs too now for web servers 😉 Btw, you look supercute in that video. 🙂

  37. Holy cow, I can’t believe I FINALLY have a legit reason to say this after reading it in your “About” section:

    Long time, no see.

    HA! lol.

    -Stephen

  38. Nice to see you back again!
    Anything new from the taskforce front, especially some insides from MS?

  40. What ever the case if your site being down i was really scared to know you being unknown for some time 🙂

  41. I know a friend of mine actually said this in the elevator in Paris (to which I responded “I can’t believe you said that! :P”) but.. as Stephen said, this warrants the same line..
    Long time, no see 😛

    Hope you had fun in Denmark 🙂

Comments are closed.