OS upgrade causes News24 downtime

"This upgrade was planned to improve load balancing and enhance the user experience when visiting News24."

Lol... guess it can't be slow if it just doesn't work at all!!

Anyways, glad it's up and running again...
 
They are using "vignette" as a CMS ... gads they must have a lot of money to waste ... somebody please tell them about Drupal.
 
tibby.dude said:
They are using "vignette" as a CMS ... gads they must have a lot of money to waste ... somebody please tell them about Drupal.
Click to expand...

vignette and drupal are 2 totally different CMS tools. It's like campairing a Hummer to a ford KA.
 
ABSA also had a huge problem with Vignette, they had people flying out from the USA to attempt to resolve their problem - with no luck.

I wonder what IOL is built on, I think they have a big open source strategy there.
 
IOL is running: Apache/1.3.37 (Unix) mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a PHP/4.4.4 mod_ssl/2.8.28 OpenSSL/0.9.8d
News24 is running: Microsoft-IIS/5.0

What CMS IOL is using, is a good question.
 
News24 is running on IIS5.0?!?!?!
wtf...Thats just daft...

IOL FTW...
 
ToxicBunny said:
News24 is running on IIS5.0?!?!?!
wtf...Thats just daft...

IOL FTW...
Click to expand...

Hey News24 has always been faster than IOL so maybe IIS is not that bad. IOL crawls on busy news days.

What I want to know is why didn't they upgrade one server at a time? So if it bombed you just disconnect it and everything keeps going?

Doing all at once seems stupid. Or was it just bad architecture in the first place which stopped them doing this?

A huge company like that should have a Backup server farm to take over in circumstances like this.... Saving money where money is required again.
 
You know GavinMannion, a more accurate post I have not seen.
IMO the 'upgrade' was a disaster.
Especially for something as fundemnetal as the OS.
What happened to testing and to QA such big changes first? hhhmmm
Why couldn't they rollback, at least sooner? hhhmmm
Where's the backups? If no backup (:rolleyes: ) / rollback servers are available, then where's the tape / disk backups?
Took quite a while for them to sort out which is simply too long for such a big / international / professional company.

Appears that the whole thing lacked control or proper planning.
 
tibby.dude said:
They are using "vignette" as a CMS ... gads they must have a lot of money to waste ... somebody please tell them about Drupal.
Click to expand...
Almost all news agencies in SA are still using vignette - it will take many more years before they all convert. Thank g0d they will probably not move to drupal.
 
GavinMannion said:
Hey News24 has always been faster than IOL so maybe IIS is not that bad. IOL crawls on busy news days.

What I want to know is why didn't they upgrade one server at a time? So if it bombed you just disconnect it and everything keeps going?

Doing all at once seems stupid. Or was it just bad architecture in the first place which stopped them doing this?

A huge company like that should have a Backup server farm to take over in circumstances like this.... Saving money where money is required again.
Click to expand...

My experience has always been that iol is faster and more available than news24. I had frequently (before the upgrade) been unable to access news24. *shrug*

But anyway, since the upgrade news24 has seemed snappier.
 
Maybe it depends on what network it is being accessed from? But IOL takes me about 2 minutes to load the front page everyday and News24 has always taken less than 10-15 seconds....?

Ag well you can't please all the people all the time :D
 
chiskop said:
My experience has always been that iol is faster and more available than news24. I had frequently (before the upgrade) been unable to access news24. *shrug*

But anyway, since the upgrade news24 has seemed snappier.
Click to expand...
AFAIK they didn't complete the upgrade.
They reinstated the previous system which was in place before the attempt of the upgrade.
 
GavinMannion said:
Maybe it depends on what network it is being accessed from? But IOL takes me about 2 minutes to load the front page everyday and News24 has always taken less than 10-15 seconds....?

Ag well you can't please all the people all the time :D
Click to expand...

Are you capped internationally? IOL unfortunately uses an overseas ad company for their advertising, and even if you block the images with an ad blocker, the actual HTTP request is still made to the overseas servers, resulting in a slow IOL load time.
 
BobbyMac said:
Almost all news agencies in SA are still using vignette - it will take many more years before they all convert. Thank g0d they will probably not move to drupal.
Click to expand...
What difference could it possibly make to the end users (or the "viewers" in this case) ?? :confused:

Out of curiosity, what've you got against drupal anyway?
 
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