Helping You Get the Most From Podango Services
This morning Podango experienced a short outage having to do with our download servers. This outage would have affected all downloads from Podango’s servers, including from iTunes and in our Flash player.
The outage has been resolved and all media files should be available as normal.
On Saturday the 27th of September we will be bringing the website down for some maintenance. This should last less then 30 min and should not effect the ability to download media. We will update insidepodango.com when the maintenance is complete.
Thank you,
The Podango Geeks.
Hi, All.
As many of you were aware, we had some issues with downloads, especially in iTunes, getting truncated. You also likely know that it was due to an issue with our hosting provider’s storage network. We’ve received word from them that they’ve resolved the issue and taken steps to make sure the issue won’t crop up again.
In addition to the word from them, we’d like to announce that we have a brought a failover service online that will help us avoid this specific problem in the future. We can now, at the flip of a switch move our download streams in a completely transparent manner from one backend to another if there is ever a disruption like occurred before.
Yup, we like you that much to bring up a redundant delivery system. 
Please let us know immediately if you hear of any other disruptions in the system, as we want to get them resolved if they exist.
Thanks as always,
Your Podango Geeks.
Hi, All.
Just a quick note to get the word out that we’re getting ready to clean out the basement, followed by the garage. In doing so, there will be an almost non-existent chance that you and your files will be affected. We wanted to get the word out, though so you all can know what is going on behind the curtain.
What we’re doing is removing the archives of all the media files our users have uploaded but then subsequently deleted, or for shows that have been deleted out of the system. This won’t affect any stations, shows or episodes in use, even ones that appear abandoned, although we’ll be contacting show owners individually about either reviving or removing those in the future.
So the process will look like this:
Like always, if you have questions, or comments, don’t hesitate to contact us.
Thanks,
Your Podango Geeks
Hi, All.
Good news: the PSBL uploader issue is finally resolved! We’re very sorry for the difficulties and the delays. We know it was painful for many of you, and we appreciate your patience.
If you’re interested in the reason, Amazon Web Services fixed a bug in their system that the code library we used (provided by Amazon) triggered. Once they fixed the bug, it broke our code and it was so buried that it took a long time to fix.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us.
Sincerely,
The Podango Geeks.
Hi, folks.
Sorry for the confusion in our last communication, and the lateness in getting this out. We’ve had several support requests come through the last couple of days alterting us to the issues with uploading into the Show Builder Lite system.
The errors say: “GigavoxException: Failure to enqueue ingest message to …”
The downtime reported previously was to work on this issue. That was resolved in the hour and only prohibited users from accessing the website at http://cms.podango.net.
The uploading issues are still persisting, and we’re doing our best to solve the problem ASAP. We know a lot of you are trying to get your shows published.
Thanks for your patience as we solve this problem. As soon as it is fixed, we’ll post a message here, as well as shoot an email to anyone who sent us a support request letting you all know that it is up again.
Thanks,
Your Podango Geeks.
We are having some problems with PSBL right now and it will require us to take it off line for about an hour later this evening. Thank you for your patience and this post will be updated with further information later.
Some users have reported that thier media is not getting added to their episodes. We are looking into this and will update here with findings.
UPDATE 6/26
The issue has been resolved and media that was not working will be shortly.
Thank you.
Earlier today it was reported that our site was down. After investigating we saw there was an error on a few of our servers connecting to our database. This issue has been resolved on our end and we are reporting our findings to our service provider. This problem is fixed now and shouldn’t happen in the future.
Thank you,
The Podango Geeks
We’ve fixed a bug that only affected large video files. It turns out that files over a certain size were being processed into .flv files (for the flash player) but then were timing out during their transfer to storage for download.
Hey all,
The hosting company we are with for Podango Show Builder Lite is current having some connectivity issues. It should be fixed soon and the log in problems should be resolved. Thank you for your patience and place look here for any updates.
UPDATE - 2008.04.07 9:45PM
Just to let you know we are still in contact with our provider and have a high priority ticket open. We are communicating with them and hope to have an ETA soon.
UPDATE - 2008.04.08 12:15AM
Still waiting for the service provider.
UPDATE - 2008.04.08 3:05AM
This issue has now been resolved. Thank you.
Hi, All.
We just wanted to post a quick note about the pending upgrade on our stats collection and display engines. We’re updating the backend databases so we can give even better stats, and as a result the stats pages won’t be updated regularly until further changes are complete and the servers are updated. All of your traffic is still being logged, and we’ll get the stats pages displaying stats soon.
Sorry for the delay.
Your Podango Geeks.
Monday morning at 8:30 EST Podango will be unavailable for 20 min so our hosting company can perform some hardware maintenance.
Thank you,
The Podango Geeks.
Hi, All.
Prepare the megaphone and keep those starbursts handy! Your faithful team of Podango Geeks is pleased to announce that we’re getting ready to deploy our new-and-improved processing system along with our new shiny-sexy-fast download system. We’re in the final stages of testing the new systems, and will keep you all posted as we roll it live.
The one-two punch of these systems will expand the our media download capacity greatly, and will improve our integration with WordPress and PodPress. We know that doesn’t sound sexy, but check back when we roll it live for more details & buzzwords. 
Sincerely,
Your favorite geeks @ Podango.
We need to do some quick database maintenance that should take less then 10 min and the only service that should be effected is downloads. A few downloads might time out but if the user is using iTunes it will check again and re-download it.
Thank you,
The Podango Geeks
- Statistics no longer timeout for podcasts with large numbers of subscribers.
Hi, All.
We’ve had reports from a few people saying they were/are having issues uploading media files to in the episode creation process.
If you are one of the (un)lucky people having this experience, we’d love to hear from you.
Please shoot us an email to our support at podango email address, we’d love to quash this bug soon, and the more detail we can get from you all, the better.
Thanks,
The Podango Geeks.
- Fixed a bug that prevented users in certain situations from deleting episodes in the file manager
- Added a download link for non-flv video media (only audio could be downloaded previously)
- Fixed a bug that affected episode order in the flash player
- Fixed a bug that was affecting the display order in the file manager
Hi, All.
We’ve tested uploads, downloads and media stitching, and they all work well in our tests. If you tried accessing the system from about 6am - 8:30am MST, you would have found things not working, but they should be now.
If you have troubles uploading, downloading, or processing media, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
If you uploaded any media during this time, and thought that it succeeded, please check the integrity of your media files. We don’t want any files that tell lies, or half-truths on our system.
Thanks again for your patience and support!
The Podango Geeks.
Hi, All.
Amazon AWS, which we use throughout our services has had an outage this morning. As we’re writing this people are reporting that their services are coming back up. For us they’re still down, but we expect service to be restored soon, and it may already be in many cases.
What this outage means to you, our customers is that most of these services don’t/didn’t work–which happen to be the most critical to you, and us:
As someone familiar with technology, you all know that, unfortunately it can fail from time to time.
We appreciate your patience and support as we work through this with our hosting providers. We’ll make another post when we’ve verified we’re up and working again.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Sincerely,
The Podango Geeks.