Subscribe-O-Matic Status

The ATM machines at our headquarers, used to renew your subscription, might go offline for brief periods of time during the day. We are in the process of introducing some plan changes which require us to update the payment ATMs.

If you want to renew your subscription while the ATMs are offlin, please contact me (MSo Lambert) in-world, or better yet, wait for the new plans, which we will announce later today. Chances are, you will need to pay much less compared to older plans, or nothing at all.

During the next few hours I’ll be upgrading some back end parts on the Subscribe-O-Matic server, so there might be a few brief outages (lasting not more than a few minutes hopefully) and your kiosks might go offline shortly.

If you planned on sending any messages in the next few hours, I advise to wait until the upgrades are complete, just in case.

[UPDATE]

The upgrades are complete, and there were no outages. Yay

Subscribe-O-Matic website and service (including in-world kiosks) will go offline for maintenance on Nov 30th between 9:30PM and 3AM PST (if you’re from Europe that’s on Dec 1st, between 05:30 AM and 11:00 AM GMT)

Downtime is due to electrical systems maintenance at the data center where Subscribe-O-Matic server is located - click here for more information.

I apologize in advance for the inconvenience.

[UPDATE: 06:00 AM PST on 12/01/07]

Maintenance at the data center is complete and everything is running smoothly

In the last few hours, Second Life has been having issues with email queues overloading, which is affecting item re-deliveries from Subscribe-O-Matic message history and might also affect gift deliveries for new subscribers. Please note that normal item and message deliveries (and other functions) are *not* affected by this.

Subscribers are getting a notice about this issue when they access the message history through your kiosks. The notice also asks your subscribers not to message you about it.

So far the support ticket has gotten no response from Linden Lab, but I’m hoping this will be resolved as soon as possible. In addition, we are working on an upgrade that will hopefully make Subscribe-O-Matic unaffected by similar Second Life issues in the future.

I will update this post as soon as there are any changes. I’m really sorry for the inconvenience.

[UPDATE: 02:00 AM PST on 11/29/07]

This has been resolved with the last region restarts. Item re-deliveries from the message history should now be working without a problem. It might take a while for the pending queue to clear though, so for the time being the notice for subscribers will still be displayed, whenever they access the message history.

[UPDATE: 06:20 AM PST on 11/29/07]

The support ticked submitted to Linden Lab was also just closed with this reply:

I am sorry for the inconvenience which happened to you. But due to a misconfiguration mails were stuck in a queue, after the rolling restart of 11/28 the error has been resolved. Unfortunately the emails before the restart are being bounced as a result.

The item re-deliveries from the message history have been working without a problem for the last few hours, so I’m also removing the notice for the subscribers.

We’re currently doing some maintenance work on http://www.subscribeomatic.com website. While we don’t expect any outages, the site might be unreachable for brief periods of time in the next two hours or so.

Subscribe-O-Matic kiosks and devices in-world are not affected by this maintenance in any way.

Due to DNS zone misconfiguration earlier today, the Subscribe-O-Matic website at http://sm.synthetik-on.net is temporarily unreachable. The error has been corrected, but it might take up to a few hours for the website to become reachable for all of you.

The Subscribe-O-Matic service is not affected by this, so your kiosks should be online and working without a problem. Any messages sent during the time the website is offline will also be visible in the message history and the RSS feeds once the website is back online.

I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

Our hosting provider seems to be experiencing smaller network problems that are currently manifesting in website slowdowns and kiosks in Second Life timing out. I’m currently checking with our provider for more information, and will update this post as I receive it.

If you were about to send a message, I suggest waiting until this issue is resolved.

I’m really sorry for the inconvenience.

[UPDATE: 10:33 AM PST on 10/01/07]
MediaTemple system engineers have identified the latency issue, and are already investigating and working on resolving it as fast as possible.

Since there is a scheduled downtime for Second Life on September 19th, we will use this downtime to also move the Subscribe-O-Matic to our new host (more information about this was posted in the previous announcement).

The service will go offline at the same time as Second Life (currently planned for 6AM PST or 13:00 GMT for those in Europe) and will be back online as soon as the DNS changes propagate around the net. This might take everywhere to a few hours to around 24 hours, but from experience, it rarely takes more than 12 hours.

If Second Life downtime will be canceled or rescheduled, we will also reschedule the Subscribe-O-Matic server move accordingly.

[UPDATE: 10:46 AM PST on 09/19/07]

The server move is completed, but it will take a bit more for the the DNS records to propagate around the globe. The website might already be online for some of you though.

[UPDATE: 04:03 PM PST on 09/19/07]

Some of the kiosks around Second Life have already started to come back online, which means the DNS changes are already reaching the Second Life grid. I’m expecting the rest of the kiosks will able to connect to the new server in the next 2-4 hours.

[UPDATE: 01:21 AM PST on 09/20/07]
While the website should already be reachable for most of you, the DNS changes still haven’t reached all Second Life servers yet, so quite a few of your kiosks are still offline. They should be coming back online through out the night and most of them should be operational before noon.

As previously announced, the Subscribe-O-Matic service will be moving to a new hosting provider soon. After some research, I decided for Media Temple.

They are an old player in the hosting business based in Los Angeles, CA and have been in business since 1998.  They host some high traffic sites like techcrunch.com (curently over 605,000 people are subscribed just to their RSS feed) and well known brands like Starbucks, Sony, Diesel and others.

Their uptime is impressive and their scalable virtual server hosting will allow us to increase our resources as the Subscribe-O-Matic service grows.

I’m already preparing for the move, and I’m expecting we will make the switch somewhere around September 10th. I will try to make the move as smooth as possible for everyone, but there might be a few hours of downtime, and messaging will be disabled until the DNS changes propagate (which means you probably won’t be able to send a message for about 24 hours, but it’s usually much quicker than this).

If you have an active Subscribe-O-Matic subscription, I would suggest that you bookmark this site, or subscribe to the RSS feed, since I will be keeping you updated on the progress when the main site will go offline for the move.

Recent item deliveries (for all of you that already use v1.7) have been temporarily turned off for maintenance - I expect to have them re-enabled in about 1 - 2 hours.

[UPDATE: 10:33 PM PST on 08/25/07]

All done! The recent item (and gift) deliveries are re-enabled and working