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Snakes on Our Servers [UPDATED]

by Thomas Hawk | 24 August 2006 | General | 25 Comments

UPDATE (15:41 PDT): We’re back online — As a bonus, I got a chance to upgrade our infrastructure — you might notice subtle speed-ups here and there.

Sorry for any inconveniences. –Kristopher

Gawwkkk! It seems that some of those Snakes on those Planes have made their way over onto our servers and unfortunately snakes and Linux servers don’t mix well. Kristopher is en route and will hopefully have us back up in an hour or so. In the meantime enjoy this comic from bLaugh. Click through on the comic to find some very valid reasons to go see Snakes on a Plane.

Snakes on a Comic

Also here’s a link to a Linux game board that has a client/server snakes game for up to four people. Here’s also something interesting to read about snake venom while you wait.

Our sincerest apologies and thanks for bearing with us.

Update: It looks like we are still having some snake problems. Apparantly these snakes are tougher than we first thought. I just spoke with Kristopher and he thinks we are at least another hour from getting things back up.

Update #2: It looks like we are back up. Thanks all for your patience.

25 Comments

  1. Gareth Hall said on 24 Aug 2006 at 10:50 am:

    Snakes you say?

    It was also down for a period this morning, around 10:30am British Summer Time.

  2. JD said on 24 Aug 2006 at 11:35 am:

    Patiently waiting……*tapping foot*
    Also patiently waiting for juploader for zooomr. Hey thomas how about a beta invite for my *patience*. hee hee
    laceyfelix (at) gmail (dot) com
    hey, all i can do is try
    Keep it up fellas, I love Zooomr!

  3. themak said on 24 Aug 2006 at 11:53 am:

    Any word on what the problem is yet?

  4. gougy said on 24 Aug 2006 at 1:04 pm:

    Good luck with snake problem and be brave.

  5. JD said on 24 Aug 2006 at 1:58 pm:

    oh Zooomr where arest thou?

  6. JD said on 24 Aug 2006 at 2:56 pm:

    Thanks guys!!!!

  7. WJ said on 24 Aug 2006 at 6:10 pm:

    Not sure if this is the correct place to post this, but smartsets doesn’t seem to be working correctly, specifically the owner criteria. Used on its own, no photos show. Used as a joint criteria, and it seems to get ignored. My builds can be access here: http://beta.zooomr.com/photos/18068@Z01

  8. Zooomr outage at themak.org said on 24 Aug 2006 at 11:00 pm:

    […] Last night photo-sharing site zooomr’s serversdecided that it was time to fall off the internet. Fortunately they are now safely within the dump truck full of snakes that is the internets, distributing huge amounts of data- huge amounts of data. […]

  9. Taavi said on 25 Aug 2006 at 1:30 am:

    Hmm, thinking about these snakes and some DDos attack that I once heared about.

    How safe is it to keep photos in Zooomr for storage? Do you keep back-ups etc?
    How do you rate the odds that my photo will still be here in two, five, ten years?

  10. michele said on 25 Aug 2006 at 3:55 am:

    Thanks for your work.
    Maybe it would be time to concentrate about server security and similar stuff. And I’d really enjoy some online tool to organize photos (eg. tagging many pictures at the same time, static sets and so on…).
    Anyway your work is very good. Thank you!

  11. Homer said on 25 Aug 2006 at 5:32 am:

    It’s a little off topic, but..

    as I’ve got a Pro account now all my new photos that I upload are downloadable in the original size -
    the images I uploaded before I was Pro aren’t.

    Is there anything I can do about it or do I have to upload those images again?

    And.. is there a way to preselect the license the photos get so that I don’t have to change it from “All rights reserved” one by one?

    Thanks a lot! :)

  12. mabisa said on 25 Aug 2006 at 6:55 am:

    Seconding Homer on the license issue - doing it photo by photo is a pain.

  13. Oblomov said on 25 Aug 2006 at 7:22 am:

    Batch editing should be allowed for most of the properties: licenses, tags, rotations, privacy (when the ability to change the privacy “post submission” will be available), permissions (when this feature will be available), etc.

  14. Thomas Hawk said on 25 Aug 2006 at 7:25 am:

    Homer, we only store actual original copies for Pro accounts. Unfortunately those previously uploaded photos would need to be reuploaded now that you are a Pro user if you wanted the original stored.

    As to changing the license feature via a preference setting. This cannot be done today but it is something that you should look for soon. It’s definitely on our list of things to do. We also hope to have a bulk tool to change all of your licenses on your photos at once for all of your existing images. Stay tuned.

    Taavi, we do keep backups of all original images for Pro users. This data is very safe and I’d say the odds that your photos will be there during the time frames that you cite are very high.

    WJ, we will look into this SmartSet issue.

    Those snakes were tough work but we’re happy to have them beat for the time being.

  15. michele said on 25 Aug 2006 at 8:40 am:

    Hey Thomas, about SmartSet.
    When you try to create a new Smart Set using some special character (eg. è and other letter wide used in Italian) in the tag criteria the wait-while-building page will run without end, and the Smart Set will not be created.
    Why don’t you set up a bugzilla server to get bugs notification and whishes by users?

  16. Thomas Hawk said on 25 Aug 2006 at 10:22 am:

    Thanks for pointing this out Michele. Yes we are aware of that and will fix that. As soon as we launch ZGrooops we will set up two seperate forums. One for people to report bugs and one for people to give us feature ideas for development.

    Thanks,

    Tom

  17. Dada said on 26 Aug 2006 at 4:34 am:

    WJ, I had the same problem with smart tags. I’ve found a work-around: I see in your URL your ‘name’ 18068@Z01, I had a ‘name’ like that, before the name was my gmail login, because I used to log in via GMAIL. It’s a good thing they’ve changed the gmail login in the URL for something anonymous.
    Now here’s the workaround that worked fine for me:

    Go to the ‘Your account’ section. there you can change your URL. Change it to something else (without the numbers and @-signs eg your display name ‘trielementz’). Then go to your smartsets again and change the name….

  18. Oblomov said on 26 Aug 2006 at 10:52 pm:

    I’m having an annoying problem: cannot post a reply to http://beta.zooomr.com/photos/oblomov/130277

  19. Oblomov said on 27 Aug 2006 at 2:12 am:

    Two questions about the LightMap:

    1. could you please provide a “Close” button :)

    2. sometimes the photo locations are somewhat off. Example: consider picture

    http://beta.zooomr.com/photos/oblomov/159046

    and open it in the LightMap. At the default zoom level, it get stacked with other five photos: while three of these are really in the same location, the other two are not. However, it may be assumed that at the given zoom level it’s more efficient to stack them.

    Now zoom in by a single clic (on the plus). Now, the distance between the photo and the ones in a separate location is almost half of the displayed map: the photo is in the middle of the map, the extra ones are instead much closer to the lower border. However, the 6 pictures are still stacked in a single balloon.

    And if you zoom by one more level (enough to isolate the picture) and then shift the map up so that “via Petraro” (where the extra pictures are) shows at the bottom, they get stacked again, even though they are at opposite borders of the map.

    It looks like the ’stacking’ algorithm is a little too aggressive.

    Separate problem: a friend of mine seems to be having problems GeoTagging maps correctly. I’m not sure if this is a problem with the LightMap being slightly off (I think I’ve seen it being slightly off in IE? She’s using Firefox though) or her moving the map without realizing or anything like that, though (I’m helping her online so I don’t actually see what she’s doing).

  20. michele said on 27 Aug 2006 at 6:17 am:

    I think the lightmap problem is a more general issue. I geotagged many pictures in the same place (all the pictures in this set) but when I look at geotag it says I only tagged 5 pictures plus the one I selected (try to click on lightmap for a picture!).
    Bugzilla! Bugzilla!

  21. WJ said on 27 Aug 2006 at 5:47 pm:

    Dada,

    Thanks for the tip! I’ve changed my display name and will try it out. What I did in the meantime was to assign a weird tag to all my photos so I can use a proxy tag in place of “owner”. Problem is all my tags have to be “match all of” or it won’t work.

  22. Oblomov said on 28 Aug 2006 at 2:24 am:

    Uhm, something wrong happened as I was uploading photos: I had about 59% of my monthly bandwidth used, and I set to upload a bunch of photos (7 photos totalling less than 13 megabytes) with privacy set to Private (Family and Friends allowed).

    When the upload was finished, my bandwidth was reduced (83% consumed) but only one of those photo appeared in the photo list: http://beta.zooomr.com/photos/oblomov/162294

    However, I get an error when trying to display it (

    Uh-Oh, Zooomr Experienced an Error
    It looks like something didn’t quite go right. If you care to help out, please kindly report this incident to our Feedback Team.

    Thank-You!

    ) and my friends can’t see it in the list at all.

  23. Oblomov said on 28 Aug 2006 at 2:13 pm:

    More problems: photos which were marked as Private but visible to friends and/or family appear in the photo list when viewed by a friend or family, but clicking on them to get to the photo page returns a 404 error.

    Also, it is not possible to easily see or change the role of a person in the social circle (i.e. see if it’s just a contact or a friend or family, or change it a posteriori): the only way is to remove them and then readd them.

  24. Dana said on 29 Aug 2006 at 8:46 am:

    Boy you zooomr bug reporters are a smart bunch of cookies. ;) I’m enjoying sitting back and watching the magic happen… hahahahaha….

  25. Jack said on 26 Aug 2007 at 5:34 am:

    Jack

    while I was surfing the internet when i found your blog i stick to it reading more and more keep going.

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