Program owners: Check your NATS, it might be broken
 

I just woke up, checked our membership sites, and discovered that ALL our join pages are down, as is our NATS admin.

Went to put in a ticket with NATS, and discovered clients.toomuchmedia.com is also down.

Got Charles on the phone, and to their credit, Dave (support tech) called me back almost immediately.

Apparently they had a major disk crash, and if your installation of NATS happens to "phone home" while their server is offline, your entire NATS goes down.

They fixed it quickly, but God knows how long our program would have been down if I hadn't happened to check.

Disk crashes suck and can happen to anyone, but I guess I now have learned that I need to have external monitoring on our join pages as well as our sites.

lol not good news

wanna hook us up with that contact info as we are currently down too

Fuck.

Excuse my french ... this shit shouldn't happen ..

could definitely use the contact info as well, can't seem to find it on their site as most of it is broken

Add me to that list needing contact info .. their site is screwed .. :)

http://toomuchmedia.com/emergency.php
Emergency support is available 24/7 by calling 732-385-1536 x212

i noticed that nearly 30 min ago

some programs are working, some are down

To their credit, we were back up and running within 10 minutes after I noticed it was down, and Charles even called me back to make sure Dave had called me.

The bad news is, we had been down for some hours... I have to look at our join stats to see for sure... and nobody from TMM tried to contact us to let us know.

It is inexplicable to me that a company selling a mission-criticial application like NATS doesn't have complete redundancy so that if the authentication server goes down, there's failover to an alternate server.... and in a situation like this, that they don't post on GFY to let people know what's happening.

By contrast, when NatNet had their issue a day or two ago, Tony was on the boards within minutes explaining the situation and updating people. But that's NatNet vs TMM. Not much of a comparison.

In case you're still having the problem TMM's phone number for emergency support is 732-385-1536 x212. The tech that helped us was Dave, his ICQ is 461-822-060, but I'm sure he's swamped so don't bug him unless your NATS is totally down.

Thanks for the heads up mate :)

Unless it's been changed, that is not a 24 hour number. When they leave the office, they are out until morning.

If they have changed this, this is a GREAT thing and kudos to TMM!!!! I will sleep better now knowing they now have real 24 hour support. But when we needed it... voice mail.

I hope everything will get fixed asap...

Albright promis...

8/24/2008 16:20:02, Albright
the issue should be fixed shortly


:(

Horrible to know that after all this time and money investing in no single point of failure for my sites, NATS comes through and proves me wrong. I had no idea this dependancy even existed. I hope to GOD they go through and figure out a way to fix this....

I mean, what if their host goes down? or gets seized? or catches on fire? A whole grip of adult sites go down for good? or at least days on end........ absolutely rediculous

it is working for us again.... :thumbsup

We are aware of the issue. We are working with our host to get our servers back up and running as soon as possible. We are sorry for any inconvenience that our server downtime has caused you.

My experience is that it's a "sort of" 24 hour number. The x212 rings to somebody's cell phone (whomever is on call, I guess).... IF they answer. It did sound like Charles wasn't quite awake when I called and reached him this morning.

A few weeks ago, our entire NATS went down on a late Saturday night. I put in an "emergency" ticket and called every 20 minutes for about 4 hours on a late Saturday night, and put in several updates to the emergency ticket. Eventually Fred called, about 8AM eastern time and in so many words said he'd been asleep. But we eventually got things fixed.

Due to the downtime of our Client Support server, many of our clients are experiencing problems with their NATS. To repair the issue yourself you can clear the contents of the nats/includes/admin_areas.php file on your server. Please make sure that you maintain the file permissions for this script.

If you would like a support tech to address this issue for you, please open a ticket at clients.toomuchmedia.com.

we just got fixed as well

yeah i got same problem too when login to webmaster area

dude - when a member emails to say his login no longer works cuz it got suspended I email him back a new login and always say 'sorry about the inconvenience' - because that's what is

having your entire business down is hardly just an inconvenience

not good news indeed...

trying to get some help and noone seems to be at support. This is not good.

I totally agree with you! I'm happy that the issue is resolved but, Damn!

To repair the issue yourself, you can clear the contents of the nats/includes/admin_areas.php file on your server. To do this, you can either ftp or ssh into your NATS server. Once in the directory for your nats, go into the includes directory. In there you can either open the file and clear all of the lines in the file, or remove the file and recreate. Please make sure that you maintain the file permissions for this script.

You can ask your host for assistance in accessing this file.