Oh noes! December 16, 2007

At the time of writing, www.userfriendly.org is unreachable. As you can see with traceroute, it seems a router along the way has failed. The IP address of the website is 66.96.16.214, but a larger range of 66.96.16.212-216 seems to be unresponsive. The network is owned by EI Catalyst, but earlier today a router from Server North on the same network showed up in the trace as well:

6 216.6.82.69 92.237 ms 239.871 ms 245.572 ms
7 216.6.57.65 248.927 ms 245.140 ms 254.694 ms
8 * * *
9 216.6.60.6 140.147 ms 244.024 ms 244.344 ms
10 216.6.54.10 253.781 ms 250.168 ms 251.876 ms
11 209.58.16.6 231.505 ms 251.706 ms 249.619 ms
12 66.96.16.3 225.662 ms 264.532 ms 250.091 ms
13 66.96.21.163 253.956 ms 233.194 ms 246.092 ms
14 66.96.21.163 250.259 ms !H 247.689 ms !H 253.769 ms !H


Actually, forget the above! While investigating the matter, User Friendly came back online on a different server. Quote:

Main UF server hosting both www and ars is currently down. This is a replacement server. ARS is still down, so the usual archive viewing will not work today. When we get that system back on its feet we’ll update you.

So much thanks to Yohimbe, because todays UF is brilliant.

UPDATE: The downtime was caused by a hardware failure in the server:

We’ve just replaced our main server. Helpfully we’d been planning this for a while. Our hand was forced by an unexplained failure on the previous hardware. We just changed the schedule. The new hardware is more reliable and faster.