Technical Eclipse of the Sun
BY: SUN STAFF
Feb 06, USA (SUN) — In the early hours of Thursday, February 2nd, we experienced a serious code break on the HareKrsna.com web servers. This event caused a critical failure of systems at the ISP's end, resulting in a temporary suspension of our account. Consequently, we have been completely offline since that time.
For those who are interested in the technical aspects of the issue, the problem was related to the CGI code in our Sun Blog software platform. Due to some unknown cause, a piece of CGI code lost integrity and began running an 'endless loop' on the web server. This resulted in a complete crash of the web server, taking down not only the HareKrsna.com website, but a number of other sites hosted on the same server.
When a circumstance like this occurs, the ISP feels it has no alternative but to freeze the problem site so other clients aren't negatively affected. What should have happened next is a typical technical troubleshoot process that would have had us back online within hours. What happened instead was a nightmare scenario with an ISP technical department that was itself 'broken'.
Five days of frantic phone calls and emails to the ISP went unanswered as we pushed to get a solution to the problem. This morning, as we were about to move the website to a new host, our ISP realized what had happened and quickly fixed the problem.
We have temporarily suspended Sun Blog service, and will rebuild on a new Blog platform using different (and hopefully more stable) software. Our old Blog ran on the Graymatter platform, which has long been known as one of the best. Unfortunately, we can no longer recommend it, as this is the second time we've experienced the 'endless loop problem', which also occurred last summer.
We offer our sincere apologies to all readers for the inconvenience. The account freeze also disabled our email services. Any emails or submissions sent to the Sun after midnight on February 1st were not received by us. Please re-send your email, and we will publish the items as quickly as possible. Emails directed to our personal @harekrsna.com addresses were also not received, and we hope will be re-sent.
Again, please accept our regrets for the disruption in service.
