Fri Jun 15 12:18:22 PDT 2012
Amazon EC2 services, the cloud where our servers reside, has called for us to shut down and relaunch well.com and user.well.com, the servers where WELL conferencing lives. Tomorrow, Saturday June 16, those services will be unavailable from approximately 9pm until 11:00pm Pacific Daylight Time while wolfy migrates services to new instances. (Last night there was significant disruption that was probably unrelated to this next action, but which also came from problems at the Amazon cloud. Sorry for the inconvenience.) Thank you for your patience and loyalty.
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Fri Jun 15 09:38:22 PDT 2012
All systems are up and running.
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Fri Jun 15 01:22:04 PDT 2012
Email is down due to problems in the Amazon Cloud. We do not have an ETA at this time, but email may not be available until late morning or later.
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Wed Mar 14 15:04:28 PDT 2012
We will be rebooting well.com and user.well.com Wednesday evening (Mar 14) at about 11pm US Pacific Time to make a minor configuration change. The reboot and maintenance will take about 20 minutes, and will effect access to the conferences via both Picospan and the Web, as well as all shell services (including alpine mail). We apologize for the inconvenience.
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Thu Mar 1 22:26:11 PST 2012
(ETA changed to midnight - we're running a bit behind schedule)
On Thursday evening between about 9pm and midnight US Pacific Time, WELL conferencing via UNIX shell and the web will be down, with all access to well.com and user.well.com disabled for the duration. During this maintenance, we will be switching over to a new system kernel - we expect that this will put an end to the kernel panics we have seen over the last two months.
Access to your email via https://iris.well.com/, POP, and IMAP will not be affected by this maintenance. However, please note that access to email via the "alpine" mail program will not be available since well.com itself will be unavailable.
We apologize for the inconvenience of this maintenance, but random system crashes are even more inconvenient.
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Thu Feb 23 21:15:19 PST 2012
ENGAGED IS DOWN - the database was accidentally trashed. We hope to have it back up by 10:30pm US Pacific Time.
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Wed Jan 11 17:00:35 PST 2012
We did not reboot Tuesday, so we will be rebooting well.com tonight, Jan 11, at about 10pm US Pacific Time. The reboot will take 5 to 10 minutes, and will effect all uses of the conferences.
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Wed Jan 11 09:37:59 PST 2012
All systems are up and running.
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Tue Jan 10 12:19:25 PST 2012
We will be rebooting well.com tonight at about 10pm US Pacific Time in an effort to address the repeated system panics. The reboot will take 5 to 10 minutes, and will effect all uses of the conferences.
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Fri Dec 16 15:43:25 PST 2011
After a reboot, people are back posting. All systems are up and running.
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Fri Dec 16 14:55:25 PST 2011
We are having a problem with the well.com and user.well.com machines. While we resolve this problem, the conferences -- our forums -- are unreachable. Email at iris.well.com and the www.well.com web page remain up. We are sorry for the inconvenience.
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Fri Dec 9 10:53:25 PST 2011
All systems are up and running.
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Thu Dec 8 2011 16:57:24 PST 2011
Our service provider, Amazon, needs to reboot our systems to perform some sort of system update (presumably patches). Fortunately, we can prevent the automatic reboot by rebooting manually. The best time for us to do this is tonight, even though that means a short notice outage.
So, tonight at about 10pm US Pacific Time, each of the various well.com systems will be brought down then rebooted. Each reboot should take less than 5 minutes, though the reboot of the Zimbra machine may take a few minutes longer (it takes several minutes just for Zimbra to shut down, and another few minutes to start up).
We apologize for the short notice for this announcement.
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Thu Oct 27 14:10:50 PDT 2011
Most remaining bugs appear to have been eradicated. If you encounter any, please report them in the cloud discussion in the welltech conference. Log in, shortcut is "g welltech" to get there.
If you use the PicoSpan interface and you're getting error messages on login, the problem may be configuration in your personal log in files. If you send a message to helpdesk, we can back up and replace your current log in files with basic files so that you can test each line to find the culprit.
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Wed Oct 26 07:45:03 PDT 2011
The WELL is now back up and running in the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2). Please report any bugs by going to the cloud discussion in the welltech conference. Log in, shortcut is "g welltech" to get there. If there is a malformed conference mentioned in an error message on your your Conference List page when you first connect to open a page at "https://user.well.com/engaged.cgi?" you may want to remove the bad conference temporarily by editing your Settings. Reporting a bug could win you one of a bunch of interesting books, so don't hesitate.
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Mon Oct 24 16:42:39 PDT 2011
Migration down-time planned
On Tuesday night, Oct 25, we finish up our migration into the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2). The last machines to be moved will be the main machine (well.com), the conferencing web server (user.well.com), and the web page server (www.well.com).
As part of this migration, conferencing (via both the command line and web browser), as well as all access to The WELL's web pages, will be disabled. Email will remain available, except for the "alpine" mailer. We're anticip