Forum downtime

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VeskoP
Posts: 580
Joined: Mon Apr 05, 2004 8:10 pm

Forum downtime

Post: # 3259Post VeskoP »

Hello everyone,

That was a slip-up, and Google is not really to blame, but let me explain what happened.

The Google crawler pushed us off the web today's morning UTC (GMT) time because the site exceeded its bandwidth quota. We actually had sufficient bandwidth to finish the month, but Google overcrawled -- see http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=263406
As you can see my post on that topic from Feb 25, I already knew of the problem (a deficiency in the forum software feature set), and fixed it two days ago -- Bastian can confirm this. What I did not expect was the following described by a phpBB forum member in a post dated today (http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.ph ... 1&start=15):
My code will not work "immediately". Google will still have plenty of URL's with SID's cached and try to spider them, but then it will see SIDless links and throw away the old links. You will see the result in a couple of days.
A tiny payment has been all it took to get us up and running again -- it could have been done much earlier, however. My apologies for this tardiness (being out of office was one reason). As you read this, Google is still madly crawling our site (it is the extra guest that can be seen in the online user status), but it will know better next time, plus we'll have a much bigger bandwidth quota in the near future, so nobody needs to worry that it'll happen again.

The page that you saw instead of the forum, was Lux Scientiae's site, our web host provider. As for those of you who wondered if we may have got hacked, we are keeping the forum very secure -- running the latest versions of the forum software and also security hardened versions of the software required to serve the web pages.

Thank you for your patience & best regards -- we are safe and at full sail now :sail:,
Vesko
Last edited by VeskoP on Sat Jun 03, 2006 4:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"Man exists physically for the sole purpose to develop spiritually" -- let us all really remember this when we think what to do next.
VeskoP
Posts: 580
Joined: Mon Apr 05, 2004 8:10 pm

Post: # 3277Post VeskoP »

Google still mindlessly craws the pages, but is going to come to its senses once it drops all the numerous invalid URLs that no longer exist on our forum (because the session IDs they had for a suffix have all expired).

In case this kind of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack continues, we'll ban Google temporarily, although it may affect search results about the forum. It's definitely a DDoS -- before Feb 28, the record users online at the same time was less than 10, whereas you can see from the title page that on Feb 28 we suddenly got 78 guests (i.e. Google, MSN coming from 76 unique IPs).
"Man exists physically for the sole purpose to develop spiritually" -- let us all really remember this when we think what to do next.
VeskoP
Posts: 580
Joined: Mon Apr 05, 2004 8:10 pm

Post: # 6341Post VeskoP »

For the record, on March 25 last year the simultaneous users reached 170 -- as evidenced by the "Most users ever online was 170" on the front page, before I just reset the number to 0 again. I have corrected "was" to "were", too -- the forum software comes with this grammatical mistake.
"Man exists physically for the sole purpose to develop spiritually" -- let us all really remember this when we think what to do next.
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ptex
Posts: 564
Joined: Tue Sep 06, 2005 11:00 am
Location: Europe, Planet Earth

Forum transfer: interruption for 10 min. +/- 5 min. (DONE)

Post: # 7908Post ptex »

Dear forum member,

As you probably saw in the thread regarding sharing forum expenses, we're going to renew forum hosting for another year.

This time, the renewing of the contract with the hosting company is a bit more than that: it's a transfer from the old account owned, managed and paid by Vesko, to a new one owned and managed by Ptex and Aisin , with temporary help from Vesko with the management (until the forum management transition announced last month is complete), to a new one owned and managed by Ptex and Aisin and paid by voluntary forum members.

Since the account transfer will mean a possible downtime for the forum, please be aware that tomorrow (November the 20th, 2006), late afternoon or sometime before late evening GMT time, you may encounter that the forum is not accessible or you cannot log in for up to 10 minutes.

We apologize for the inconvenience and we (together with he hosting provider) will do our best to minimize impact in forum availability.
Vesko will be managing and supervising the transfer, so we can count on a very professional service.

Thanks for your understanding.

Please feel free to contact us in case of need.
VeskoP
Posts: 580
Joined: Mon Apr 05, 2004 8:10 pm

Post: # 7912Post VeskoP »

Update:

Due to certain considerations by the web host, the transfer operation will be delayed. There has been no and is not going to be any interruption of service because of this today.

We will post an update later today or early tomorrow.
"Man exists physically for the sole purpose to develop spiritually" -- let us all really remember this when we think what to do next.
VeskoP
Posts: 580
Joined: Mon Apr 05, 2004 8:10 pm

Post: # 7930Post VeskoP »

The aforementioned operation will definitely be carried out within about 8 hours and may result in 10 minutes of forum downtime, give or take 5 minutes.

P.S.

I was responsible for posting an update, as promised before, and I didn't, because shortly following my last post, and somewhat unexpectedly, it became clear that the operation isn't very likely to be performed during the next 1-2 days, and it was unclear exactly when it would be, although it was sure to be within several days. I judged posting that was likely to be just a waste of readers' time.
"Man exists physically for the sole purpose to develop spiritually" -- let us all really remember this when we think what to do next.
VeskoP
Posts: 580
Joined: Mon Apr 05, 2004 8:10 pm

Post: # 7931Post VeskoP »

The operations has finished recently. According to the web host, who performed the final stage, the downtime was about 6 min. total (or 4, depending on how I interpret their words). People who browse the forum via http:// addresses, rather than https:// ones, i.e. who use non-secure access, should have experienced, again according to the web host, even shorter downtime -- about 2 minutes.

I was actively browsing the forum at the time, and detected a downtime of about 2 minutes.
"Man exists physically for the sole purpose to develop spiritually" -- let us all really remember this when we think what to do next.
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ptex
Posts: 564
Joined: Tue Sep 06, 2005 11:00 am
Location: Europe, Planet Earth

Forum downtime

Post: # 8873Post ptex »

Hello everyone,

Today (May 25th 2007) we have a scheduled maintenance intervention at 20:30 (08:30pm) GMT.
The forum should be inaccessible for a maximum of 2,5 hours. We should be back online by 23:00 GMT (hopefully before).

During that period of time, all access to the forum will be redirected to a temporary page with the maintenance message.

If you have any suggestion or comment, please reply within this thread.

Sorry about the inconvenience.

:)
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ptex
Posts: 564
Joined: Tue Sep 06, 2005 11:00 am
Location: Europe, Planet Earth

Post: # 8875Post ptex »

Hi,

We're back online.
The maintenance took a bit longer than we expected (more ~40 min.).

The forum seems to be working well.

Please report if anything out of ordinary happens (God forbid) ;)
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ptex
Posts: 564
Joined: Tue Sep 06, 2005 11:00 am
Location: Europe, Planet Earth

Re: Forum downtime

Post: # 10724Post ptex »

Dear friends,

You'll probably notice that tonight (GMT standard but hour still uncertain) the forum will temporarily be offline while we're doing urgent maintenance tasks on the forum.

The offline period should be very brief and thus I'm not posting an exact time of intervention for the moment.

If for some reason you hit the time when the forum is unavailable, my apologies for this but I'd strongly recommend you go out and play lottery as you should hit something there too

:)
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ptex
Posts: 564
Joined: Tue Sep 06, 2005 11:00 am
Location: Europe, Planet Earth

Re: Forum downtime

Post: # 10725Post ptex »

Maintenance has been done with 1 day of difference from programmed. The Forum has been upgraded to the latest version and all tests I did have been successful.

If you notice something weird regarding the forum, please post a message here or contact me either through PM or e-Mail.
Enjoy :thumright:
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