RealClimate.org – down

UPDATE: As of 10PM PST, RC is back up and running, no mention of the outage though – Anthony

I figured I’d better note this since a number of people have brought it to my attention. Trying to reach realclimate.org was giving a 502 error much of today, which is likely due to an internal problem with their database used to run WordPress. They run a custom version of wordpress code and theme on a LAMP configuration, and it appears the PHP code can no longer communicate with the MySQL database.

After several hours of that 502 error, realclimate.org is now giving a 503 error:

Service Temporarily Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

Here’s some background on these codes:

Error: 503 Service Unavailable
The server is currently unavailable (because it is overloaded or down for maintenance). Generally, this is a temporary state.

Error: 502 Bad Gateway

A 502 Bad Gateway error occurs when the front-end web server cannot communicate with the application responsible for responding to the request. To resolve this error:

  • Confirm that the application is running. If the application crashed, was terminated, or has not yet started following a system reboot, the application must be restarted to respond to requests. If the application was terminated, you will receive a notification email with additional information.To restart the application manually, please see your application type’s documentation or control panel entry for instructions.Most stopped applications are automatically restarted during periodic cron jobs. Please see the application’s entry in the control panel for details.
  • Confirm that the application is listening to the correct port. Check your application’s configuration to make sure that it is listening to the port assigned to the application in the control panel.

Gavin is probably pulling out what little hair he has about right now.

This is why I use wordpress.com – I don’t have to worry about maintenance, hacking, updates, or other server related issues.

Based on the return codes, the issues at RC today are likely due to internal code or maintenance problems, so I wouldn’t speculate beyond that.

0 0 votes
Article Rating

Discover more from Watts Up With That?

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

82 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
phlogiston
October 17, 2011 8:49 pm

HarryHelpMe!

October 17, 2011 8:52 pm

And – RC is UP:
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
10/17/11 22:48:05 Browsing http://www.realclimate.org/
Fetching http://www.realclimate.org/
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: http://www.realclimate.org
Connection: close
User-Agent: Sam Spade 1.14
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2011 03:48:17 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: close
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.9
X-Pingback: http://www.realclimate.org/xmlrpc.php
3f23
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” dir=”ltr” lang=”en-US”>
<head profile=”http://gmpg.org/xfn/11″>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ />
<title> RealClimate</title>

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

October 17, 2011 8:52 pm

Up now…

savethesharks
October 17, 2011 8:53 pm

Maybe Gavin is trying to cover his tracks so it can’t be shown as to how so very much time he has spent blogging and posting and moderating a website while on the taxpayer’s clock.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

DR
October 17, 2011 8:54 pm

http://www.wnd.com is down too.

Martin Clauss
October 17, 2011 8:55 pm

It’s 8:54 Arizona Time (which is the same as Pacific Daylight time since AZ doesn’t go on daylight savings time), and RC is back up . .

October 17, 2011 9:03 pm

Anthony/mods – Who has the sense of humor?
Check out “X-hacker” header line below:
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
10/17/11 22:56:48 Browsing http://wattsupwiththat.com/
Fetching http://wattsupwiththat.com/
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: wattsupwiththat.com
Connection: close
User-Agent: Sam Spade 1.14
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2011 03:56:50 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: close
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Last-Modified: Tue, 18 Oct 2011 03:54:50 +0000
Cache-Control: max-age=180, must-revalidate
Vary: Cookie
X-hacker: If you’re reading this, you should visit automattic.com/jobs and apply to join the fun, mention this header.
X-Pingback: http://wattsupwiththat.com/xmlrpc.php
Link: <http://wp.me/7y4l&gt;; rel=shortlink
X-nananana: Batcache
efd
<!DOCTYPE html>
<!–[if IE 6]>
<html id=”ie6″ dir=”ltr” lang=”en”>
<![endif]–>
<!–[if IE 7]>
<html id=”ie7″ dir=”ltr” lang=”en”>
<![endif]–>
<!–[if IE 8]>
<html id=”ie8″ dir=”ltr” lang=”en”>
<![endif]–>
<!–[if !(IE 6) | !(IE 7) | !(IE 8) ]><!–>
<html dir=”ltr” lang=”en”>
<!–<![endif]–>
<!–
generated 120 seconds ago
generated in 0.978 seconds
served from batcache in 0.005 seconds
expires in 180 seconds
–>
<head>
<meta charset=”UTF-8″ />
<title>Watts Up With That?</title>

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

October 17, 2011 9:08 pm

It’s bad Karma to use a computer to make light of people having computer problems.

October 17, 2011 9:48 pm

Has anyone blamed the ‘Skeptics’ yet?
Wouldn’t surprise me.

petermue
October 17, 2011 10:29 pm

Maybe they Bore Holed themselves.
LOL

October 17, 2011 10:38 pm

Error 504: Debating the “Science” Permanently Unavailable

jeef
October 17, 2011 10:53 pm

I bet every cynical clickthrough from WUWT quadrupled their traffic hourly!

NZ Willy
October 18, 2011 12:07 am

Don’t care if they’re up or down or outta here…

Crispin in Waterloo
October 18, 2011 12:10 am

The RC server is not running, it’s drooling.
Now because of this failure of ‘service’ for so many hours, and taking a lesson from RIM, we all deserve an apology in the form of $100 worth of free downloaded programmes, each.
I will accept, for my entire $100 credit, a download of the programme used to generate the CRU temperature output files, fully annotated by HarryReadMe.
I believe Steve McIntyre has a little list…

Truthseeker
October 18, 2011 12:13 am

Maybe Trenberth’s missing heat was in their servers and the cooling system could not cope …

KenB
October 18, 2011 12:13 am

petermue
Thinking the same, Gavin’s been enlarging the borehole and the censorship props failed dumping the site in with the rest. Think of all that accumulated crud they carried and of course we know they are not meticulous engineers!!

DirkH
October 18, 2011 12:26 am

When you have a website that already lies in their header image, you shouldn’t expect truth below that (The same holds for SkepticalScience).

October 18, 2011 1:13 am

No mention of outage…perhaps really they don’t expect anybody to notice.
So now there are hundreds of True Believers going to argue “502 Error” against evil deniers.

Orkneygal
October 18, 2011 2:58 am

“Gavin is probably pulling out what little hair he has about right now.”
Was that comment really necessary?
Anyway, the Borehole is available again. Best part of the entire site.
Later…….

Man Bearpigg
October 18, 2011 3:22 am

I wonder if there were any hidden/password access forums on there that have mysteriously vanished ?

Hoser
October 18, 2011 7:08 am

We are still on daylight saving time. PDT.

Miguel
October 18, 2011 7:16 am

It’s just been announced that Gavin Schmidt will be the recipient of AGU’s first Climate Communications Award.

Snotrocket
October 18, 2011 9:29 am

According to a leak from an engineer fixing RC’s X-Box/Commodore 64, the problem was down to ‘parasitic oscillations due to inter-stage feedback in the Eccles-Jordan mono-stable double diode flip-flop’.
(Now, everything but one element of the bold is a true condition, but that one ‘untruth’ makes the whole statement a lie. There’s a parable for our times, perhaps.)

October 18, 2011 11:24 am

Crispin in Waterloo
harry did not work on CRUTEMP.
so many people get this wrong. the harry readme does not refer to ANY work done on hadcru.
Its an entirely different dataset that nobody even uses.

Frumious Bandersnatch
October 18, 2011 11:38 am

Only an idiot studying to be a moron would even consider running critical apps on a light weight DB engine such as MySQL. They should only be using an enterprise level one such as Postgres, Ingres, etc.
Way, way too many problems with MySQL. More especially as the relational model is not strictly enforced. Now try rolling back from an error in such a situation. Database inconsistencies everywhere…