My Opera News

This morning around 8 AM CEST we found out that no file from files.myopera.com was accessible anymore.
If you were using My Opera at that time, you certainly saw lots of Forbidden (403s) errors.

The server couldn't access any file on the filesystem.
All pictures gone, all user css gone, every user file missing.

Connecting to the machine, and trying to get directory contents, we only got back I/O errors.
We tried to remount the folder, with no luck. We also tried to stop all services, unmount and remount. Didn't work. Then we rebooted the server, hoping for a clean mount of the filesystem.

It worked. Except that it was down again 2 hours later.



Our mighty sysadmins started working on the issue, and by lunch time, it was fixed.
Then we restarted the services, and everything looked good. At around 12:15 CEST, the files were back online. No data loss reported. Just panic for a while :-)

What happened is that a tiny little fibre channel connector, also known as GBIC, decided to leave this cruel world this morning.

Right on time to celebrate our 3,000,000 users!

Hi My Opera members! This is your favourite My Opera lead developer speaking :-)

We have scheduled a hopefully short downtime of systems to get a new release out. Tomorrow, at least for some of us here in Old Europe, at 09:00 UTC, 10:00 CET. There were about 60 squashed bugs and all pre-flight checks show green lights.

We hope to have the smallest possible downtime, but we are preparing the ground for really big and exciting new features, to be released gradually in the next few months!

Stay tuned for the changelog of this release and other stuff... Thank you!

We will be taking down the Opera Community for some much needed maintenance Tuesday 10th of October. There will unfortunately be none of the promised hardware updates this time around, however we have quite a few new features and under-the-hood fixes for you.

We've had this update laying around the office, with the monkeys groping it, for a couple of weeks, hoping to be able to coincide the software update with the hardware update. We've had to realise, however, that the hardware update will not be doable within a couple of more weeks, due to a lot of unforseen delays outside our influence. Therefore we go ahead with the software update now, hoping the downtime will pay off in terms of increased performance, even on the old hardware.

Due to some major database schema restructuring, the downtime will be significant. We are looking at four to five hours of downtime, starting at 08:00CET (6AM UTC), Tuesday October 10th.

When we return, we will be offering some new features and fixes:

Blogging

• redesigned blog posting interface
  
• allow blog post excerpts to show on your blog front page with "read more" links to the entry proper
  
• specifiable URLs for blog posts (e.g., http://my.opera.com/olekasper/blog/new-mms-handler/ )
  
• possibility to have polls in the sidebar
  
• improved photo album slideshow in the blog sidebar
  

Other

• use faster scaling algorithm for uploaded images, should speed up image uploads significantly
  
• delete self-made folders in "My Files"
  
• you can now delete own posts in the forums (but not entire topics)
  
• improved search interface for forums
  
• moved forum announcements to hopefully make them a bit more visible
  
• changed RSS feed validator, hopefully making more feeds work when you add them under "Links"
  
• email activation reintroduced
  
• a multitude of minor (and major) bug fixes
  
• a multitude of significant under-the-hood optimisations