Chassis swap (???)

tkinva · #1 09-21-2007, 10:06 PM

I have a "Swamp Croc" account and, up 'til now, Hostgator has been a pretty good hosting service.

Checking our web logs this morning showed that the server had been down from about 10pm Thursday night until about 7:15 Friday morning.

A little over nine hours. Our web sites and our email are on this server.

I called tech support and they told me that the server that I'm on (Gator192) received a "chassis swap" last night.

They were unable to tell me if this was a repair or an upgrade, or why it took over nine hours to do the swap. I was unable to find out if anything from our sites had been lost due to restoration from a backup.

I'm just wondering if someone here could shed some more light on this situation.

***GatorPatrick*** · #2 09-23-2007, 07:12 PM

Hello, this was an upgrade to gator192's hardware. No data was lost in the swap as we didn't have to restore from any backups.

***GatorBrent*** · #3 09-25-2007, 06:15 PM

The chassi swap would have only taken 20 minutes. I'm not sure where you got that 9 hour time from but that definitely isn't correct. I'm shooting you off an email now to learn more.

***GatorDaveC*** · #4 09-26-2007, 01:24 AM

The chassis swap it self is usually under 20 minutes, unless there is some sort of complication such as a VLAN problem.

Our migration code syncs all of the data to the new servers. This process may be done several times before we actually get the server swapped to ensure up-to-date data.

Once we are ready to have the new server to take place of the old one, we create a loop in our migration code to keep the data current. In the loop step, there is one difference -- We don't include the transfer of the entire home directory, all we transfer in home is your mail. It would cause MySQL and Mail, as well as other areas we transfer to hard to keep in sync if we migrated everything in your home directory constantly.

So tkinva,
The answer to your question is, no the server was not down for hours. Your /home directory content (excluding mail) was not being synced at that time. From what I recall, gator192 was the last server done on Thursday night to Friday morning.

If you need the files from your tmp directory, I should be able to pull them off the old server.

For more information on the Server Upgrade, here is the forum post http://forums.hostgator.com/showthread.php?t=21231 .

gwyneth · #5 09-26-2007, 02:14 AM

Wow, GatorDaveC, as an objective bystander this seems like a really informative answer and great service, too.