Just a reminder, tonight at 11 PM we will be performing an emergency maintenance on part of our electrical system. This will have an impact on a portion of our shared web and database servers, and eight dedicated and colocated servers. The shared hosting servers affected are:

acacia, acorn, alder, aralia, arrowwood, ash, aspen, avocado, balsa, balsam, bamboo, banana, banyan, bayberry, beech, bigleaf, blackberry, boojum, boxwood, bubinga, buckeye, cactus, cedar, cherry, chestnut, cholla, cinnamon, clover, columbia, commerce2, commerce3, cork, cottonwood, db, deerwood, dogwood, ebony, elm, evergreen, ficus, fig, filbert, fuji, gingko, grape, grapevine, hackberry, hazel, hemlock, hickory, ironbark, ivy, kentia, kola, kudzu, larch, laurel, lilac, lime, madrona, magnolia, mango, mangrove, maple, mesquite, mimosa, moringa, mulberry, myrtle, newninewire, ninewire2, olive, orchid, palmetto, papaya, pear, pecan, plum, poplar, privet, quince, redbud, sassafras, savin, sequoia, sherwood, snowberry, spiceberry, spruce, strawberry, sycamore, tamarack, teak, truffula, tutsan, walnut, woodpecker, yucca, yulan/fern

Every effort will be made to minimize the downtime. Our electricians have estimated the time required to complete the task at 2 hours.

Thank you for your patience and understanding while we strive to build a better facility.

Update 1:15 AM: The maintenance went very smoothly and was completed in under 90 minutes. We were able to supply alternate power to the few dedicated and colo servers involved in the maintenance. We also took the opportunity to replace some failed parts in a couple of servers (acorn for example whose fan inside the power supply had stopped working.)

Again, thank you so much for your patience during this critical maintenance interval.

On Wednesday, April 29th 2004, at 7:30 PM PST, we will be upgrading Lasso on balsa.forest.net and banana.forest.net to version 6.0.6, the latest version of Lasso Professional 6. The new version provides a fix to the error handling functionality in Lasso, which had been creating some problems for customers designing and debugging new sites. The new version should also further improve performance and reliability.

Update: The upgrade on balsa.forest.net has been delayed until next Wednesday, May 5th 2004.

As a reminder, Lasso Professional 7 hosting is available for interested customers. click here for more details.

No code changes should be necessary, but we recommend checking your site after the upgrade to verify that your site is functioning as expected.

This Friday (February 13, 2004), at 9:00 PST, we will be upgrading Lasso Professional on balsa.forest.net and banana.forest.net from version 6.0.4 to 6.05. A brief restart of the server may be required.

Lasso Professional 6.0.5 includes fixes for security, reliability, and tag functionality issues. No code changes should be necessary, but we do recommend checking your site as soon as possible after the upgrade. Please feel free to contact client support if you have any questions or concerns.

Lasso Professional 7 Hosting is now available. Please contact your account manager if you're interested in upgrading.

Balsa is back up and running. One tape was damaged, and a few files were not recoverable as a result, totalling about one meg of data (out of six gigs). Please check your site and make sure everything is working as expected. Thank you for your patience with this problem.

We are currently in the process of restoring Balsa from the last backup, which is about a day and a half old. As soon as the restoration is complete (which may take several hours, as we're pulling the data from tape), we will install the new disk and it should be good to go.

The Balsa server is presently down for emergency maintenance.

05:58 PDT
We've having some hardware trouble with the Balsa server that's going to take a little while to sort out. Service will be restored within the day.

Balsa seems to have a problem with starting Lasso. We have a tech looking at the error now and we will hopefully have it online again shortly.

Update - Lasso on balsa has been restored. The issue was a corrupt lassoMySQL table.

Balsa is currently down for Lasso and OS upgrades. These upgrades should increase system stability, reliability, and response time.

Thank you for your patience while we complete the upgrades on Balsa; estimated downtime is 1 hour.

Update (9:50pm Pacific Time): The upgrade is taking longer than expected due to data conversion issues involved in the migration from OS 10.1 to OS 10.2. At this moment our technicians place the downtime at one additional hour.

On Friday, March 28 2003 at 7:00 PM we will be upgrading balsa.forest.net to Lasso 6. We will also take the oppurtunity to upgrade the Lasso Manager to the latest version, which offers an easier interface for configuring security and several new features.

Other than the new features in version 6, the primary benefit for customers will be vastly improved startup and reload time and improvements to FileMaker Remote functionality that help ensure more graceful handling of FileMaker server outages (sites associated with other FileMaker hosts that are not down will continue to work properly during an outage, and the system will recognize and recover automatically once a host comes back up). Combined, the improvements should greatly increase stability and overall user expierence.

While Lasso 6 is backward compatible with Lasso 5 code and all security and other information will be upgraded automatically, we do encourage you to take a look at your site after the upgrade to ensure everything is working properly. A Lasso technician will be available via our normal emergency contacts throughout the evening to assist with any customer concerns.

FTP, MySQL and Web services on balsa.forest.net in preparation of an operating system upgrade and Lasso maintenance.

balsa.forest.net had suffered severe catalog and directory corruption -- after trying three different disk utility programs, we were finally able to restore the directory structure and bring the machine fully back online.

In the near future, we will be swapping in a new hard drive as an additional precautionary measure. The swap will be scheduled and coordinated to minimize any downtime.

balsa.forest.net, the Lasso 5 server, is experiencing disk problems. A technician is coming in to the office to make repairs and bring it back online. We will post again when the problem has been resolved.