If you’ve been trying to access your Home Server remotely over the past few hours, you will have come across some problems. That’s because livenode.com is down for maintenance - at this stage, it sounds like this was scheduled, but there was no communication out to the community.
Here’s the official alert from the WHS team:
Windows Live Custom Domain service will be down for server webstore upgrade on Tuesday 6/5 at 11:00am PST.
The Dynamic DNS Web services as well as the DNS service itself for all Home Server beta customers will be unavailable during this deployment change.
Remote access to machines via their livenode.com domain names will not be available during this time.
The service downtime is expected to last several hours or longer.
Thank you for your patience and your help in testing Windows Home Server Remote Access feature.
Given the huge impact this kind of maintenance has on users (basically switching off remote access), it’s absolutely imperative that a better solution is found to communicate planned maintenance to the community. Whether this is via a “Latest News” message in the WHS Console, or via a separate page/RSS feed on livenode.com or another mechanic, people need to know that they won’t be able to get Remote Access for a few hours.
June 6th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
I think you exegerate too much in your comment. Off course the absence of the livenode system is not pleasant but what’s wrong with inputting your IP number? In that way Remote Access is normally available, only not through livenode.
Greetings, Ruud
June 6th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Hi Ruud,
For you and me, putting in our IP number isn’t a problem. But the point of WHS is to hide a lot of the more technical aspects of usage away from the less technical user. Otherwise, why use a livenode URL in the firstplace?
Think about the product positioning - this kind of issue is a negative experience clue. It’s just a communications challenge that should be easily resolved.
Thanks for the comment!
Terry
June 7th, 2007 at 11:55 am
Hi Terry, I agree fully with you. But most of the current users are imho capable of using straight IP. On the Forum some users said that there was no connection possible at all and that was the main reason for my reaction.
Greetings, Ruud
July 9th, 2007 at 9:54 pm
thats why i use no-ip.com……………