Server Outage and More

[PrplPplEater]

I'm noticing that the posts seem to go through, but the Last Post info at the forum level doesn't seem to get updated. Hopefully vBulletin support will have a simple fix for it.

[PrplPplEater]

The expected downtime won't be happening until after midnight EDT/ 0400 GMT, now. The server is racked, but they won't be provisioning the circuit to give us our bandwidth until 10pm EDT, so it will be 11pm at the earliest, but most likely midnight, before I can get to it.

the good part of this is that most everything will happen while everyone is sleeping.

[MadMike]

I also noticed that we haven't had any new users since the upgrade. I haven't tried it out to verify this, but I'm guessing the registration system got broken somehow. On one hand, no new spammers, which is a plus, but we might have legitimate users who want to sign up. I don't know if that's one of the things you're fixing, but I figured I'd mention it just in case.

[PrplPplEater]

well, it still hasn't happened. These individuals running the new place seem exceptionally knowledgeable and generally pretty cool, but so far they have been less than ideal when it comes to doing things on any sort of schedule. Once our circuit is live (what is that... a 5 minute job to provision it and see a MAC address?), that will hopefully be the last that we need them to do anything on any sort of timetable. The datacenter is nicer than the one we were in, and I have 24x7 keycard access, so that much is good... sadly, we're still waiting on that circuit to go live.

[PrplPplEater]

FINALLY!!

Server is up and accessible, IPs are working. I have two separate test sites that are working, so we're all set to start the move.

Site will be getting closed at 2PM EDT and I'll begin the process of backing up the data and doing a final move to the new server.

[EricKei]

Notes for all, as I assume most of our current posters are reading this one

Some settings have changed automatically due to the update:
- User avatars (on by default) and signatures (OFF by default) can be toggled
- You can use mentions now - e.g. EricKei -- and yes, their avatar is added once you do this
- Go into the bar at the very top-right that shows your name, then click User Settings to get to this stuff - then Account, and scroll down to Conversation Detail Options. That same section is also now where you can edit your sigs.
- The old Report functionality is now part of the Flag function (bottom right of a post). Please use that for now, when needed.

[PrplPplEater]

For the record, I will be turning off the web server on the old server today at noon. Enough time will have passed for like 95% of everyone's DNS to have updated, but if anyone has issues starting around noon today, this is why and you should just close the browser, re-open it, then periodically try to reload the page. Eventually your machine will get the updated DNS and it will work for you. I'd like to be able to leave the old server up longer, but I need to get it out of the old datacenter and I can see by the amount of traffic between the old and new server that most everyone is already up-to-date. The traffic levels are WAY lower between the two servers than it was just 12 hours ago, and are low enough to suggest that only the occasional user is still pointed to the old IP address.

[Nunavut Pants]

When on the main "board" page, you can see the title of the topic most recently responded to in each forum, and who responded to them.

When I look at the line for "Annals of Ancient CS", I see this:

The Annals of Ancient CSReposts from before hacks in here if you know who posted it before...

53

503

latisse online buy buy latisse chicago latisse online purchase buy cheap latisse by pzychobitch 06-22-2020, 07:27 PM

Notice the post title on the right--super spammy! The URL is links to is this: http://www.customerssuck.com/board/f...sse#post121303

When I try to go to that link, I get "Not authorized to view this page". When I go to the forum itself, the most recently-responded thread is "Welcome to the Realm of Satan", and the last response is by pzychobitch. But the response is from 2011, not 2020.

It looks like there may have been a spam post that was deleted but is still referenced in the list of boards. Not sure if pzychobitch responded to that one as well, or it's just picking up thier ID erroneously.

[PrplPplEater]

Sorry about today's outage.
The reason for it was a configuration item in MySQL. One of the first things vBulletin was going to ask me to do in an attempt to resolve the responsiveness issue here was to increase a value (packet size) since it was at the very low default of 4MB, so I set out to take care of what *should* have been a very simple tweak. Needless to say, it didn't go as planned. Everything is back up, and oddly, we are even on an even newer version of MySQL now (between original setup last week and this happening today, another build was released!).

In the end, SQL was upgraded and the setting was changed, and now I can actually get vBulletin to help.

[EricKei]

Pants - Thanks! I checked the offending post, I apparently nuked it a few years ago. The origin date, however, shows as 1969... sigh OK, fess up! Who's been messing with the timeline again?

[EricKei]

Current board stuff:

• If anyone is still having trouble posting, logging in, etc, please mention it in here or on the FB group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/customerssuck
• PPE is doing some major board work (planned for Tuesday/Wednesday US time). (insert technical jibber-jabber here)
• He's been looking into a crapload of stuff behind the scenes, including but not limited to: Permissions (which may prevent you from posting), not being able to upload images (incl both attachments and avatars)(apparently FIXED), error messages when posting (just hit F5 and your post should show up), board speed, et al
• If you get ANY error messages, please take a screenshot and post it here and/or in the board bugs section. For the latter, just upload it to Imgur and post a link. Seeing these codes will go a long way toward tracking the bugs down and squishing them with extreme prejudice. FB is a good place, too.

Update-indeedly-doodly: PPE has implemented SSL on both servers. Your shortcuts should auto-redirect, but if they don't, the official URL is now:

https://www.customerssuck.com/board/

Also, he's been running a test on a copy of the boards with some fixes. Expect some downtime for implementation tomorrow night for Fratching and the next day for CS.

Also, issue due to encoding changes since the last time the board software was updated, back in ye olde days of ancren rewel: Some punctuation marks have been replaced by ASCII garbage. You'll need to fix those manually if it matters to you -- though signatures are likely to be the only place where it's noticeable. This should only happen on stuff that existed before the current board upgrade/iteration.

e.g.: "I?€™m well aware" instead of "I'm well aware "

Image uploads/attachments, including avatars, appear to be fixed. Have fun with that.

Thank you all very much for your patience!

[EricKei]

Update:

ASCII garbage in posts/sigs/etc should now have been automagically fixed.

Speed enhancement work is ongoing, with the aid of VBulletin. Still in the "that should have helped" phase; please bear with us.

Working on the permissions issues (e.g. how some folks can reply to this thread but others cannot), with similar frustration. We'll get it sorted out.

Image uploads are confirmed to work; note that most images will be compressed significantly, tho things like avatars will be fine. As always, if you wanna link to an external image instead, PLEASE use WIMG instead of IMG tags if it's wider than 800px or so. Also, sites other than imgur seem to be unreliable with regards to how long pics remain available for viewing (see that images mega-thread to see what I mean; it's around here somewhere).

[PrplPplEater]

The super annoying performance issues have been resolved.

Please let us know if you notice anything else going slowly, but I think it's pretty dang solid now.
And now, we can turn to the other items
Keep the bug reports coming, and we'll get the place ironed out!