Media72 Hosting Articles and Tips

Media72 are very excited to announce we have teamed up with the guys at PeepCode to give away free PeepCode screencasts. Simply signup for one of our Ruby on Rails accounts and receive a PeepCode coupon code entitling you to any screencast absolutely free.

For those that don’t know PeepCode produce very high quality screencasts tutorials for Ruby on Rails developers covering topics from Ruby on Rails basics, rSpec, Git, Merb and much more.

To receive your free screencast sign up for on of our Ruby on Rails accounts hosted on our UK servers.

Over the next week accounts hosted on the bingo.media72.net server will be migrated to new servers in our London data centre, after the migration is completed the bingo server will be decommissioned.

How will this affect you?

For most customers there will be no service interruption, accounts will be migrated and the bingo server will point all traffic to the new server until the DNS has fully propagated.

While we expect the majority of accounts to transfer seamlessly, some accounts with unusual or custom set-ups may not have all of their settings transferred. In this situation you should contact our support desk and we will work with you to get your settings copied to the new server.

Customers who do not use the Media72 DNS servers will need to manually change all DNS entries to point to the new IP address they have been assigned. The main shared IP addresses for the new servers are as follows:

teahupoo.media72.net - 85.13.243.178
shipstern.media72.net - 85.13.243.211

Customers with dedicated IP addresses using their own DNS servers should wait to hear from us before changing any DNS settings.

After your account has been migrated you will need to change any bookmarks such as ftp server, control panel address and mail servers referencing the bingo server directly to point to the new server.

When will this happen?

Accounts will be moved in four stages:

1. Ruby on Rails accounts will be moved to the teahupoo server on Wednesday 9th July
2. Non reseller accounts will be moved to the shipstern server on Thursday 10th July
3. Reseller accounts will be moved to the teahupoo or shipstern servers on Friday 11th July
4. Any accounts with dedicated IP addresses will be moved over the weekend 12th-13th July

If you have any questions or concerns about the migration please contact our support department who will be happy to answer any questions you may have.

After a number of requests the javascript_auto_include plugin now has additional functionality, many people wanted to be able to use the same javascript file in more than one view. It’s now possible to do this by naming files like new-edit.js, you can string as many views together as you like using the “-” character as a delimiter.

Install the plugin using one of the following methods:

script/plugin install http://kernowsoul.com/svn/plugins/javascript_auto_include

Using rails 2.1 and above:

script/plugin install git://github.com/kernow/javascript_auto_include.git

Thank you to all the people who requested this feature.

Greg Pollack from Rails Envy has posted a nice Railsconf in 36 minutes video for all the people that could not make it, like us.

We are pleased to say the bingo server is now fully operational and there are no outstanding issues we are aware of. There was a short downtime cause when our data centre provide rebooted their network without warning and changed some vital settings. We worked with the data centre to resolve this issue quickly.

At this time we are responding to any support tickets as soon as possible and have additional resources available to deal with ay issues you may have.

We will be making an official announcement regarding the recent server outage and future plans in the next few days. We would like to thank all of our customers for their patience and understanding over the last few days.

Media72 Staff

For all customers experiencing DNS update issues we highly recommend using Open DNS, this is a free service and will enable you to view your sites instantly rather than having to wait for your ISP or local network DNS to be updated.

Dear Customers,

We are pleased to say the bingo.media72.net server has now been brought back online. As we were not confident the data centre hosting this server would remain stable we moved the server to an alternative data centre. As a result all IP addresses on the server have changed. This means all domains DNS records needed to be updated, if you are using the Media72 nameservers this will have been done automatically for you and you will not need to take any further action. If you are using your own nameservers you will need to point your domain(s) to the new IP address before it can work. Please change all references of 207.44.185.105 to the new IP address of 74.55.73.72.

Thank you for your patience and understanding during this extremely frustrating time.

Media72 Staff

This issues has now been resolved

Dear Customers,

It has come to our attention that the data centre hosting a number of our servers has had a major explosion. What follows is the notification from the data centre.

“…electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.

We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.”

“…Our initial assessment, although early, points to being able to have some service restored by late on Sunday. Rest assured we are working around the clock.”

The majority of our servers are unaffected as they are housed in a different physical location, however, the following servers have been affected by the explosion:

bingo.media72.net
shipstern.media72.net

While the circumstances of this outage are completely beyond our control, we do apologise for the impact to our customers and thank you for your patience while the data centre staff work to restore power and service.

Please refer to our blog for updates on the situation.

Media72 Staff