Shawn Sorichetti

My Saturday started off fairly normal. Took the kids to karate, quick lunch, build a shed. At 4:45PM EDT, that’s when things got interesting.

I’d received an IM from Kristopher Tate, he was recovering the Zooomr PostgreSQL and needed some help. I’d offered him help during the initial 10 minute launch, and now he was taking me up on that offer. The issue, being the RAID adaptor had died, and left the database in an unstable state.

After trying a couple things, the root cause of the database problem became apparent, and the only choice left was to restore the pre-launch database. By 8:30pm we’d worked our way through the restore process, and reset the database to where it was at launch time. Kris had a couple other fixes that needed to be made prior to launch.

During this time I was allowed to access the sandbox system, take screenshots and share them with everyone. I was very impressed with how much quicker Mark III is, and with the new features. I created a couple groups, one of the joys of getting early access.

Just prior to launch there were a couple more database issues, and an issue with Gmail not accepting mail or marking it as spam. The database issues were fixed, but Gmail would have to wait, it was time to launch.

The launch went fairly smoothly and Zooomr Mark III was here to stay. There were a couple of adjustments required, but everyone seemed happy. At 3:30am with things looking pretty good, it was time for me to crash. I no longer have the ability to stay up all night coding like Kris. To be 19 and full of energy again.

Congratulations to Kris and Thomas on rolling out a fine update to Zooomr.

Zooomr is still down, however the blog photos are now available again.

The community had rallied around zooomr and managed to raise over $1500 during zooomr’s time of need. Hardware vendors like Sun and Dell stepped up to the plate too. Dell fixed the failing pieces of the existing database server, and Sun has loaned a x4500 with 48TB of disk to get Zooomr back up and running. Zoho has provided support, a comparable server to the one that died and colocation space.

The Zooomr blog is now also having issues, when it rains, it pours for Zooomr, and there has been a lot written lately about these outages, both positive and negative. Perhaps the best written, and the most up to date is from Zolio. His post makes a lot of valid points and summarizes Zooomr’s status. Thomas Hawk has also commented giving an even more detailed history, plus what the current plans are for bringing Zooomr back online.

[Update: The community has started a Zooomr Wiki page to report the latest news while the blog is down.]

[Update: The wiki is moving to Zoho]

[Update: Thomas Hawk’s official update]

Last night Zooomr Mark III launched. After a long week of “just a couple more hours”, “it’ll be up tomorrow”, “once this is fixed we’re done”, the highly anticipated site came back online to much fanfare. For 15 minutes.

Normally, this type of outage would be chalked up to overload of the system. The Slashdot or Digg effect. This however was not the case. After a week of database migration, the database server appears to have suffered a RAID card failure. A video of Kris Tate standing in front of the system clearly shows a hardware RAID failure. Along with a dejected Kris making a plea for better hardware.

Robert Scoble has put out a call to arms to all hardware vendors to support the little startup with a lot of heart. Other community members, have also taken up the cause, sending Tweets, blog posts, and emailing hardware vendors. I don’t think community support of Zooomr has ever been stronger.

As a single developer or “go to guy” on a number of projects my heart goes out to Kris. As a member of the Zooomr community my support for Zooomr remains solid. As a fan of the little guy, I’m cheering for you guys.

[update: Zooomr Hits take]

[update: Thomas’s post]

[update: New server on the way]

Zooomr is attempting another migration to their Mark III release. The migration is planned to take 12 to 24 hours.

At the start of this migration attempt, Thomas and Kris held a bit of a launch party on ustream.tv, announcing their intentions and doing a QA.

The migration is still continuing as is the broadcast. Thomas continues updates on the migration, and has been taking questions on all kinds of photography topics. It’s not often that I have access to a photographer of Thomas’s calibre, to ask any question.

Thank you Thomas for making yourself available, and good luck on the migration to you and Kris.

UPDATE: The migration continues

Zooomr Mark III is launching. The outage is supposed to be about 2 days, but they’ve promised that existing blogged photos will be available the entire time. Their downtime does give me some more time to preen my photo collection rather than just posting the ones I feel are the best.

I’m looking forward to a big upgrade over the previous code (over 250 NEW features). I’ve had some bumps during my time with them, and more than a couple things on my ‘wish they had’ list, but overall I’m happy.

I wish Kris and Thomas luck with their upgrade, and hopefully a speedy return of service.

6 Million Dollar Home Hosted on Zooomr

I’ve had a lot of requests as to what the inside of my new camera bag looks like. Yes, the picture above is the outside, but I thought it would be neat to show off one of Zooomr’s coolest features. Portals.

Zooomr’s portals allow you to connect one picture to another via a small window. In this case, moving your mouse over the lid of the bag shows you what the inside looks like. If you click in the portal, it’ll take you to a picture of the inside. (Go ahead, click the image above and check it out).

Inside the bag Hosted on Zooomr

Now that you’re looking at the inside, there are various notes describing the contents of the bag. If you click on the lid (the mesh part) you’re taken back to the picture of the closed bag.

Thomas Hawk (CEO of Zooomr) has shown off some other uses for portals here on his blog and here on the Zooomr blog.

I’ve been using Zooomr since December 15th to host my photos for blog entries. I discovered Zooomr when reading an article about Thomas Hawk’s switch to a Mac. The switch to Mac didn’t attracted me to his work, it was a comment in the story about the quality of his photos.

I started following Thomas’ blog, and while admiring his pictures, I also liked they way they were presented in the blog. That’s what led me to register. I received a free Pro account when I found this post on free upgrades for bloggers.

While I do receive compliments on how the photos look in my blog, I also hear comments as to how slowly they load. I’ve also had the same experience. The load times from Zooomr aren’t consistent. So far the features that Zooomr offers outweigh the number of complaints, so I’ll stick with it.

Today, there appeared to be a couple of issues. 500 errors, and really slow response time. I attribute this to Thomas Hawk’s Babes of CES which, rightfully so, has been getting a lot of attention.

My biggest issue with Zooomr has to be a lack of upload client. There is jUploadr, but it’s interface is severely lacking, doesn’t work consistently, and the biggest issue, doesn’t support files being sent to it from Lightroom like Flickr Uploadr. I looked into PictureSync, which claims to have requested an API Key from Zooomr prior to September 2006, but never received one. I installed Flock thinking that I could replace MarsEdit, Flickr Uploadr, and upload to Zooomr. Again support has been looked into, but isn’t in place yet.

For now, I’m uploading through the web form, which isn’t a normal part of my workflow. Hopefully there will be another method soon.

update: After posting this entry, I noticed this entry that confirmed there was a Denial of Babes Attack