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Schlock Mercenary datacenter evacuated… update is 3 hours early

28 Comments

According to one account (which I read on the internet, so it must be true) the EV1 datacenter where Schlock Mercenary is hosted had a “major electrical issue” and has been evacuated.

So… Sunday’s Schlock Mercenary update is below…

I probably could have waited until update time for this, but I’ve got other stuff to do tonight. It’s the weekend, after all.

I hope everybody at EV1 is okay.

28 thoughts on “Schlock Mercenary datacenter evacuated… update is 3 hours early”

  4. It’s not just Schlock that’s down. As far as I can tell, all of BLC is down, since I can’t get onto their forums, or Wapsi Square.

  5. Agh, thank you so much! With all these BLC sites down, my webcomics reading for today was significantly less awesome. (Which is really bad, because Saturdays are bad days for webcomics even without half the good ones being down.)

  6. Unfortunately…

    Things like this happening (among others) with near-daily frequency are why Illiad moved UserFriendly away from EV1 back in 2004.

    1. What’s your point?

      What’s your point?

      This is the first outtage I’ve had with them in four years. This kind of thing could happen to anybody. The only way to prevent it is to mirror the datacenter in another city. It’s called a “smoking hole” solution, and it gets pricey.

      1. Re: What’s your point?

        Just stating what has happened with them in the past; they may have sacked and reorganized completely since then – I don’t know. I just know that in 2004, their hosting service was being persistently dodgy to the point of sites being totally unreachable for several hours a day on a regular basis; Illiad went around with them for what seemed like a month or more trying to get them to fix the problem before he finally threw up his hands and moved the whole thing.

        1. Re: What’s your point?

          I’ve had customers with RackShack/EV1servers/ThePlanet since they first opened, and this is the first time I’ve seen the datacenter cratered.

      2. Not a total smoking hole

        In a smoking hole situation, the servers are destroyed too. Here, I see two clear weaknesses: There was only one power room (no redundancy), and it was in the same structure as the datacenter (allowing the explosion to cause heavy damage to the first floor wiring). All that said, I think it’s amazing and wonderful that no one was injured in this incident.

          1. Well, what’re we waiting for? Let’s switch this country over to metrics already!

            “The Canadians will think we’re smart.
            Or at least they will think we are not as dumb!”

            ~Atom and his Package, “The Metric System”

  10. I got an alert from my hosting company this morning;
    “Due to a fire and explosion due to an electrical short at the third-party data centre hosting this machine, ns3.ukservers.net is currently offline. This should have no discernable effect on our services.”

    ns3 is hosted by ThePlanet, at EV1.

  11. I can just hear the tayler.com server whimpering in the fear that a sizable proportion of the usual daily readers will work out to look here.

      1. So… the FOURTH wall was left standing? … good heavens, the servers know how to stay in character, don’t they?

        Glad everyone was all right and things appear to be working now! 😀

  14. Latest information is that they’ll be starting to bring power in about 5 PM CST, and will hopefully have servers going online by 9PM.

    They’ll need that four hour gap for testing of air handling systems, load balancers, and so forth.

  15. WOW…
    Reminds me of the time the West Coast went down (Some twit with a backhoe pulled up the thigh-thick cable going over Donner Pass… Totally severed it, IIRC-) and we were down for only a few hours before everything was re-routed and back up.
    It amazed the heck out of the folks who knew the backstory of the Net, because apparently- when the Defense Dept. first started putting it together, they hoped that communications would only be down for a few days in the case of a catastrophic failure like that.
    (But I may be mis-remembering that part of the tale,)

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