Folding Forum

The stats server seems to be going down about every two to three weeks at the moment - it seems a very short maintenance cycle

What's more worrying is the cron job that ensures it only develops faults outside working hours

Stanford general announcement wrote:Multiple Administrative Systems are offline until 8:00 am Tuesday July 28th while PeopleSoft undergoes planned changes.
For details visit the University IT Website at:
https://as.stanford.edu/News/applicatio ... oft-change

Not sure if this is related in any way to the missing 3rd party points or the inability to return some WUs seen in other posts.

Nothing obvious in the list of affected applications but far from impossible- depends how Stanford's networks are configured.

I'm with you Bill ... nothing for sure. However, fah-web.stanford.edu appears to be down (unable to reach Project Summary or Server Status) and I'm fairly certain that is required for 3rd party updates.

It is- that's where the summary files are located (according to the urls on folding.stanford.edu, which is accessible).

bollix47 wrote:

Stanford general announcement wrote:Multiple Administrative Systems are offline until 8:00 am Tuesday July 28th while PeopleSoft undergoes planned changes.
For details visit the University IT Website at:
https://as.stanford.edu/News/applicatio ... oft-change

Not sure if this is related in any way to the missing 3rd party points or the inability to return some WUs seen in other posts.

I would have though this unlikely as a reason ... Downtime is quoted as 5 pm last Friday until 8 am Tuesday (today) and we did not lose updates until yesterday afternoon is as good a reason as any.

More likely this is just the most recent failure of some services running on fah-web.stanford.edu. This has been happening every few weeks since early this Summer. Dr. Pande has already posted that this server is overloaded and in the process of being replaced. The stats themselves should be fine, this server is just a front-end to the stats database server.

If the folding staff know that the page will be down than why is there no information on this on the 'News' page? Or am I looking at the wrong 'News' page?

I don't think this was a planned outage, usually only those get posted to the blog page. A message about the problem may be posted later, but I have no information on whether or not that will happen. As for the server itself, it is up and reachable. Just the various scripts that should return information are failing to run at the moment.

Thank you Joe_H.

There was a several-day scheduled outage for many of the systems on the Stanford network but FAH was not one of them. The FAH servers did, in fact, continue running throughout those four days so no action on your part was needed[/ur;] (If I had been the FAH person receiving that notification, I would not have recommended a FAH notification.)

Given how many systems were included in the upgrade, however, I'm not surprised that something unexpected blocked some inter-server communications but that probably means that the data are just queued for transmission when communications is restored.

It's a pretty sad state of affairs, is it as simple as replacing the server? If it's a funding issue I'm sure we can all chip in to help, or even to hire someone to sort out the existing one.

Stanford does upgrade their servers periodically, but that's a planned expenditure and (A) They're a lot more expensive that you're probably thinking, and (B) that doesn't explain what has been happening (C) The campus-wide software upgrade might explain it.

And is up again...