Omega stability updates - Bytesized Hosting

Hey guys,

As you are probably aware Omega has not been very stable these last few days. I want to explain why this is happening and what I am doing to combat it.

First off let me explain the testing procedures up until now. We started early alpha testing with all the new software in the beginning of June. At that point our main concern was finding bugs with the slicing of the apps and the communication software that runs from the website to the servers. We invited some early testers at the end of July to help us with this task. Things like automatic file renaming and extracting were all made because of early feedback from these users.

In August we moved to a different phase of testing. We needed to find out how this new hardware behaves when it's actually being used. Plex can be a very consuming application so I needed to make sure the server could hold it's on. I also wrote our new server software stack for the latest Ubuntu LTS.

Right now I'm encountering some problems with the new server and our software. For one it seems there is a bug in the kernel quota code, the code that keeps track how much disk space you are using that makes the server crash in rare occasions. Now I found out that the bug is already fixed in the latest kernel versions but that version is not available from the Ubuntu repositories yet so I will have to build that ourselves. I hope to roll that fix out later today.

This is however probably not the last bug I need to fix. I think that the downtime from saturday might be caused by an other kernel problem having to do with the virtualization layer we use for Plex.

It's my number one priority right now to see if I can make it a stable experience. I've always anticipated problems like these, that's why I didn't charge the normal amount but only the five euro token. Still I like to move forward and have a stable experience.

I will make updates to this news item to keep you informed of what I'm doing behind the scenes as I continue to pursue these problems.

Animazing