On August 3rd around 11:30pm, the machine hosting a number of Movable Type web sites, including this one suffered a major hardware failure. We worked through the night and into the day in order to restore availability as quickly as possible. As of approximately 5:20 pm on August 4 we were able to fully restore the following web sites:
- www.movabletype.org
- plugins.movabletype.org
- forums.movabletype.org
We will continue to work on fully restoring the following sites and services through the night:
- wiki.movabletype.org
- www.learningmovabletype.com
- www.thestylearchive.com
- www.thestylecontest.com
Stay tuned to this blog post for additional updates throughout the night and into tomorrow as we bring our entire set of services back up to full availability.
Joe Siegler
August 4, 2008 8:59 PM | Reply
I've been through a few of these with some sites I've been involved with. I feel your pain.
kimonostereo
August 4, 2008 10:01 PM | Reply
Best wishes to the folks hard at work on the backend of things. I hope you can get some rest once all is recovered! Good luck! I feel for you all as I've gone through this myself.
Byrne Reese
August 4, 2008 11:28 PM | Reply
@Joe & @kimonostereo - I can't tell you how nice it is for the first two comments to be that of support. I know just how inconvenient this outage was to a lot of people in the community, but I am glad to know that people are understanding and sympathetic. The light at the end of the tunnel is that mt.org and all of its subsites are being moved to a much more robust stack that will be far more resilient even to the worst case scenarios like what we experienced last night.
demonsurfer
August 5, 2008 3:13 AM | Reply
No worries Byrne, these things happen. heh.. I seriously thought this was a ruse, and everything was going to come back up live with a whole new surprise look to coincide with the release of MT4.2 :)
Joe Siegler
replied to comment from Byrne Reese
August 5, 2008 8:56 AM | Reply
That wasn't just "being nice". I've genuinely been through a few of those. One required driving 35 miles to get a hard drive that was no longer manufactured to get the server up and running. It was later replaced, but we needed to get a drive in there to recover the data, some strangeness with the RAID array on that box.
Anyway, I know the nightmare and sinking feeling hardware failures can be.
demonsurfer
August 6, 2008 6:57 AM | Reply
BTW, the beta page http://movabletype.org/beta/415/ only has up to RC1 available now, instead of RC4 ..must be an outdated backup.
Richard Benson
August 6, 2008 7:24 AM | Reply
Cripes!
I feel for you guys, I too have had that happen and all nighters required with 100 mile round trips to data recovery guys!
My favourite one was when I had to make a call to spend £900 of the company's money at 4am, when I'm not authorised to spend anything without speaking to a manager (who was on a plane anyway!).
Good luck getting it back up and getting all the content back.
Joe Siegler
replied to comment from demonsurfer
August 6, 2008 8:20 AM | Reply
That's not the right link. You're looking in the wrong place.
http://www.movabletype.org/beta
demonsurfer
August 6, 2008 8:28 AM | Reply
Oops, quite right thanks Joe. The link to 'MT Beta Homepage' on the nav on the right of this very page is pointing to the link I posted above though, unfortunately.
Byrne Reese
replied to comment from demonsurfer
August 6, 2008 11:34 AM | Reply
Thank you for this report. We will inserting a redirect to address the obsolete URL and we have republished all of MT.org to update the sidebar links to point to the more current page. Sorry for the confusion.