Dedicated Server down, no response

andrewlehmandesign · 02-24-2008, 05:22 PM

Hello,

I'm writing this here since there is no server-problem forum set up for us with dedicated machines. Our dedicated server, olympia, has been down for over 4 hours now. We opened a ticket nearly FOUR HOURS ago asking for a simple powercycle, since it was not responding to ssh attempts. So far no response from Host Nexus. Not even a "we're swamped, will get to it as soon as possible." We have lots of pissed off clients wanting to know when their sites will be back online, but I don't know what to tell them since I can't get a response from HostNexus. I even called Australia (long distance from US) and left a voicemail to see if that would get a response. I even called Fortress ITX (The datacenter HostNexus is using to house our server) but they said they couldn't help me since we are technically HostNexus's customers.

So I thought I'd voice my frustration here in the hopes that somebody at HostNexus will notice this and get on it. The support ticket ID is PIX-970219.

HostNexus has always been helpful and responsive in the past, so I don't know what's going on today.

EDIT: they finally responded, and our server is back. They were apparently hard at work fixing the problem, but forgot to update us and let us know, hence the frustration.

~ Bob

**NexDog** · 02-27-2008, 08:47 PM

Sorry about that, Bob. Mike was working on the issue but forgot to check the tickets. When an alert comes in techs just go direct to the server to fix the issue. I understand it was some form of DoS.

andrewlehmandesign · 02-27-2008, 09:44 PM

Thanks Laurence,

Yeah, you guys are always responsive, which was why it was so confusing. Yep, it was DoS attack, which Mike worked hard to thwart.

I'm investigating ways to backup some vital sites to our other dedicated server in the event of a future attack or just in case that server catastrophically fails some day. I'm going to look into the script which creates the nightly backups and see if I can either modify it or create a similar script which will ftp copies of certain sites to the other dedicated server. That way a simple dns change and those sites would be back up pronto.

~ Bob

**NexDog** · 02-27-2008, 09:50 PM

You can use Plesk's backup system to backupto a remote FTP location (your other server). What you'd also need is an external DNS service with a low TTL setting. So then in the event of a catastrophe we would restore the backup files (would have to be done via command line) and then change domain A records. Plesk versions will need to be the same on both servers for this to work though.

andrewlehmandesign · 02-27-2008, 10:09 PM

I tried doing an ftp backup with some domains on olympia, but it always ended in random error codes. It would successfully send the data to our office, but then would freak out and would keep showing an error until I manually deleted the backup file from our office computer.

Also, I've heard some scary things about Plesk backup/restores on the SwSoft support board, which is why I was thinking of utilizing the nightly backup script, which uses rsync I believe to make copies to the backup drive. Those backups have already proven valuable when I've had to restore a sites for whatever reason.

However, doing it with rsync would be troublesome though because I would have to manually recreate the sites on the other server (and re-setup the mailboxes/mail-forwards/etc...). I suppose if I can get the ftp backups working properly I would probably want to go the built in Plesk route.

I guess this should probably move into support ticket territory at this point.

~ Bob

**NexDog** · 02-27-2008, 10:17 PM

There are other solutions but none are simple. You could use a similar to our backup system which backs up data on the fly. But you'd also need to backup the PSA database remotely so it has all the mailbox, database entries and all that stuff too. Just let us know if you need any help or advice on this.