Hello,

I noticed that the site and forum where down from 10.00 till 16.00 (GMT+1).
Where there problems with the server ?
Or is maintenance done ?

Greetings,
Bertus

 

The server had to be physically moved from one rack to another early this morning. This was done by the ISP. However after the server was moved and booted up, the database server (MySQL) didn't seem to start. This lead to the site not functioning until I woke up and had a chance to fix things.

Sorry about the inconvenience this may have caused anyone!

Rob

 

I've been curious about the physical setup on the server. Is it a single computer in a university or what?

 

Sounds like there are two servers from what he described. The place I moderate is all on one server, and even then, we share the server with others (not sure what/who they are or what they are running - but we do share it).

Our board has fewer members than here, but just as many posts per day.

 

Hi guys,

AAC is hosted on just one server at the moment. Our ISP is Softlayer (http://softlayer.com), a really fantastic dedicated hosting provider.

Server Specs:

Motherboard: SuperMicro PDSMI Intel Pentium DualCore SingleProc Sata
CPU: Intel Pentium D 930 3GHZ
RAM: 2GB DDR2
Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB

The server seems to be holding up under our surge in traffic this year.

 

Today, we experienced a major down-time which, at this moment, we are unsure of the cause of. This down time also didn't flag up on our error reporting systems. We will be working on looking for the cause(s) and eliminating anything that may cause this to happen in the future. Thank you to all members that alerted me via e-mail of the site being down.

Apologies for any inconvenience.

Dave

 

Are we still doing okay today? It's clear, so I don't suspect my satellite link, but I am having very slow page loads, and some even coming in blank. Firefox indicates "done", so it thinks the page data got transferred.

Hope the server isn't getting unstable again.

 

Are we still doing okay today? It's clear, so I don't suspect my satellite link, but I am having very slow page loads, and some even coming in blank. Firefox indicates "done", so it thinks the page data got transferred.

Hope the server isn't getting unstable again.

All appears to have been ok today. Rob did a restart yesterday evening (evening here in the UK, morning to some of you guys state-side) and that seems to have fixed the issues.

We'd be interested in hearing if anyone else is having issues today.

Dave

 

As ever, two pages after I gritch, the connection and page loading are as fast as they should be. But I had to log back in three times.

 

As ever, two pages after I gritch, the connection and page loading are as fast as they should be.

Good. At least we know we have a solution!

But I had to log back in three times.

If you are starting to experience persistent log-in issues, log-out, close your browser, and clear all AAC cookies, then try logging in again.

Dave

 

Do I need to? - the message "all cookies cleared" pops up every time I log out.

Must I deepen my already considerable paranoia and assume the board server is not to be trusted?

 

Do I need to? - the message "all cookies cleared" pops up every time I log out.

Must I deepen my already considerable paranoia and assume the board server is not to be trusted?

You should only attempt the manual "clear all cookies" if you are having log-in issues.

What sometime happens is the forum cookies get corrupted (for one of many reasons); this corruption knocks-on and sometimes causes flaky log-in status, for example one minute you are logged in and another you are not. The first, and simplest, way to deal with this is to clear all cookies for the allaboutcircuits.com domain. When you get the all cookies cleared notice when you log out it is likely telling the truth for that session, however there may have been a corruption from a previous browsing session. The problem (I must stress not a serious one) is actually on your computer, and not the AAC server, so it shouldn't serve to exacerbate your paranoia. Naturally there could be more to it, but for isolated cases it is a necessary first step.

Dave

 

It's stranger than that. If I understand you properly, the corrupted cookies would prevent logging in. I had no such problem. But I would find myself on the next page with the welcome message absent and have to relog before posting a reply.

This is another session for me, and everything looks normal.

 

It's stranger than that. If I understand you properly, the corrupted cookies would prevent logging in. I had no such problem. But I would find myself on the next page with the welcome message absent and have to relog before posting a reply.

Sometimes. Other times you can log-in, however when you navigate to a page you have already been on it logs you out. It is rare and the results are somewhat arbitrary. Browser settings have sometimes been a factor also.

This is another session for me, and everything looks normal.

No probs. Let us know if there are other issues and we can work through them.

Dave