Jim Goings

My first official vacation this year was good, but interrupted by work almost every single day.  I don’t mind the occasional phone call, but after reviewing my call log I noted that I received 22 calls that week.   All but one were important enough to call me, but it’s still frustrating that it’s so hard to get away.   I also had to deal with several “fires” that cropped up and threatened to deter Jive’s move into our new building. Perhaps this was just the ultimate in bad timing, but what could I do since the time off was planned around Chris’ visit?

Chris, Karen, and baby Owen came up and we had a great time with them despite the interruptions.  We had several dinner parties throughout the week and got to hang out with lots of friends.  We went to Juan Colorado a couple of times as Chris says that despite the fact that they live in San Diego, they can’t find good Mexican food.

We made it to the Saturday market (on Sunday go figure) and enjoyed the great weather.  It only rained for the 10 minutes we spent eating under a canopy… perfect timing on our part.  We heard some dreadful performances by a children’s singer.  I suppose you might like it if you were a kid, but I found it annoying.  We also received some free hugs as you can see from the picture above.  You can see a host of miscellaneous pictures from the week on Flickr.

While the ladies were enjoying a few hours at a salon, we went to the zoo with Megan and Farnz.  We only spent a couple of hours there which is great since we go there so often.  The annual passes we have really come in handy!  You can view the entire set of zoo pictures on Flickr.

On Thursday we took advantage of the perfect weather and went to the beach.  The Killians, Howlands, and Goings families all piled into the van (14 of us in all) and drove to Seaside.  In our haste to put sunscreen on the kids, the adults forgot and we all got nice sunburns.  It was all worth it though.  Afterwards, we took teh scenic way back through Astoria and took the opportunity to drive across that roller coaster shaped bridge.  You just have to drive on it to believe it.  You can see the full set of beach pictures on Flickr.

For Mothers Day, I made my mom a video and posted it on a blog that I setup for her. You can see the blog and video at http://www.luannhopkins.com

I’ve been watching the development of the Enterprise Octopus ever since Sam posted about him. (Yes, Sam, I know you think he’s a she, but he’s not a she, he’s a he, or so he tells me). Since then, he’s had to grow up real fast and before he knew it, he was being unpacked at the Web 2.0 Expo. I felt that he needed some to just hang out and, well, do what any Enterprise Octopus would do.

This is the Enterprise Octopus chillin’ with Michael, our lead web designer, known around the office as Sigler and sometimes Chibby or Chibbs.

As you can see, the Enterprise Octopus loves whiskey.

Despite the whiskey intake, the Enterprise Octopus wanted to try out a bicycle. We don’t allow riding in the office ever since the “incident” so he had to settle for just sitting on it.

All that whiskey had to go somewhere. I think this settles any possible debate about whether the Enterprise Octopus is a girl or a boy. I swear I didn’t coerce him into choosing one restroom over the other.

I host two sites on Media Temple; this one and my Dungeons and Dragons community site, Dragon Avenue. I have been using them for a few months now and I can say without hesitation two things:

1. Media Temple has some of the slickest features out there.
2. My sites either go down or take over ten seconds to load frequently. By frequently, I mean daily.

I have had a couple of phone calls with their tech support folks, including one manager, who seemed sympathetic but unable to offer any advice on how to address the issue. At first, (mt) seemed to sweep the issue under the rug. Communication was infrequent and it took days (no kidding) to even get a response from tech support (as reported by not just me, but my friends who use them as well).

Now they seem to have taken to apologizing for the outages each time they occur.I recently commented on one of their outage reports, but I don’t expect I’ll hear anything back… at least anything that is tangible. I wonder if they’ll even approve my comments to be revealed to the public. Given that none of their recent blogs have comments, I suspect not.

They still aren’t talking about the slowness at all though. As long as their servers respond to web requests within a minute or so, then all is right with the world in their eyes. Yes, that was a bit of hyperbole, but my points are valid.

I recently opened a ticket with them asking about the outages and even asked if switching to a DV plan would eliminate them:

Support response: 2008/04/01 16:37
This depends on the cause of the issue. I have found a good number of causes for timeouts having to do with external resources being pulled. Now if it is a routing issue, moving to a (dv) would help . One thing that would help us in troubleshooting your issue would be to provide us with trace route results to your server.

Just let us know which path you will want to go.

I replied:

Site is timing out currently at 11:10PM on 4/8/2008. Here is a tracert as requested. As you can see, the issue isn’t network related (at least on the Internet side of things). I should note that this isn’t rare. The site times out often, sometimes many times per day.

I suspect that your servers are over loaded, but that’s just my speculation. Either way, I need to have my site reliably available. Please help.

tracert www.dragonavenue.com

Tracing route to www.dragonavenue.com [64.13.232.65]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms FIOS_Router.home [192.168.1.1]
2 8 ms 7 ms 6 ms L100.VFTTP-02.PTLDOR.verizon-gni.net [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]
3 8 ms 6 ms 7 ms P2-2.LCR-02.PTLDOR.verizon-gni.net [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]
4 26 ms 24 ms 24 ms so-6-0-0-0.PEER-RTR1.SJC80.verizon-gni.net [130.81.17.133]
5 24 ms 24 ms 24 ms 130.81.15.26
6 81 ms 32 ms 31 ms avanz.ge3-1.2.cr01.lax03.pccwbtn.net [63.218.91.30]
7 32 ms 32 ms 32 ms cr01-2-2.lax4.net2ez.com [64.93.64.74]
8 33 ms 32 ms 32 ms cust-77.lax4.net2ez.com [64.93.75.14]
9 33 ms 32 ms 31 ms 72.10.63.210
10 33 ms 32 ms 31 ms acmkoiegkq.gs02.gridserver.com [64.13.232.65]

Trace complete.

To ensure that they had as much information as possible, I even provided them with 3rd party verification:

Further verification from monitus that the issue isn’t related to my home network:

** PROBLEM alert - www.dragonavenue.com HTTP PROBLEM **
PROBLEM Alert
Service: HTTP
URL: http://www.dragonavenue.com
Tag: Default
State: CRITICAL
Date/Time: 2008-04-09 06:14:47 GMT

Additional Information: Connection refused.

Get your own monitoring at http://monitis.com
Best regards, monitis team.

Here is their response.

The brief outage you have experienced tonight was due to an outstanding issue we have with our (gs) hardware which you can read more about here:

http://weblog.mediatemple.net/weblog/category/system-incidents/gs-grid-service-intermittent-service-availability/

The trace route that you posted is exceptional, your problem is not network related. Contrary to what the last technician said, moving to a (dv) hosting plan you would not have these problems anymore. The issues are isolated to our (gs) hosting plan only. If you wish to try out our (dv) package, I can set one up for you with 1 free month so you can check it out. Let me know if you would like to do that and I’ll set that up for you.

Lame. Just lame. No acknowledgment of the fact that the outages occur daily for minutes at a time or the general slowness that is epidemically affecting their two “grids”.

Here is a screenshot of just one page full of alerts from Monitus, a third party monitoring service. Check the dates on the right column. Sad.

Switching hosts is a PITA. In fact, I tried to switch today and ran into some issues around the Apache mod-rewrite rules that make Dragon Avenue work correctly. As such, I bailed out until I can get some help figuring out how to change the rules appropriately. In addition, there is a rumored compatibility issue with Apache 2.x and Expression Engine. I couldn’t find the info on that, but the host I attempted to move to indicated that there was a problem and the fix was a code change.

As I said, switching hosts is a PITA. I can only hope that Media Temple will really fix their issues or that my patience will end and I will be forced to tackle the burden of switching. Sigh.

The weather was decent early this afternoon and Rebecca wanted to get Levi a bike. He’s the youngest and the only kids of ours without a bike. Naturally, we went to Bike -n- Hike in Hillsboro because they’ve always treated us well. We picked out a bike for Levi that he liked (they only had one in his size - so it’s good that he likes it). We traded the training wheels for the kick stand. We don’t need no stinkin’ training wheels. Levi was up and riding in about an hour. He still needs to practice, but he’s gotten the hang of balancing already!

While we were at the bike shop, Beck spotted the white hawaiian Electra Townie 21 that she’s been wanting. It was all decked out already. The only negative is that it didn’t have an internal hub, but that just means it’ll need maintenance every once in a while… not a big deal. It’s a gorgeous bike.

You can see the whole set of pics on Flickr.