It is now the time for our forum server/service to get a little attention. This is currently scheduled for later today, but is as yet in the planning stage. Again, as per the recent rockstor.com and Appman services, there will be down time: due primarily to our hosting providers facilities, our financial clout (lack of it currently), and my own availability (many plates to keep spinning).
Note that the forum is actually quite large now so each offline snapshot takes quite some time. I will likely also be doing an online snapshot which would be best done after putting the forum in read-only maintenance mode. This state may persist for several hours as may the entire down state so again apologies all around.
I will endeavour to update this post as-and-when. But of course in the case of the forum server maintenance that may not actually be possible.
Fingers crossed folks. In the future we may be able to improve our uptime during such events but all in good time and we manage with what we can currently afford: both financially and personal resource wise.
OK folks.
My apologies for the extended read-only status of the forum. There was much to do and much now done. One more ‘proper’ down time coming up in the next few minutes for around 20 minutes as I do a final offline snapshot at our hosting provider and then hopefully we are back to normal.
I will endeavour to update this thread again there-after.
OK, I think we are out of the woods. We now have new monitoring software installed on this node and all looks good, at least with the last couple of days testing. Let see how things go in the wild but I think, for now at least, we are back to forum as usual.
Again apologies for the interruption of service on this one. I had to work stuff out as I went along as we have had much change in the background but it all looks to be as-was, from the front end at least.
So fingers crossed and if all admin and moderators could keep an eye on forum functions as best we can that would be dandy.
Thanks to @Hooverdan, our proactive moderator, a forum miss-configuration, possibly years in place, was discovered when we removed our prior shadow domain as part of the recent forum update/maintenance. This has since been resolved (uploaded images work again) but I’l like to take another offline snapshot as we also now have a minor memory re-config that would also be good to incorporate in this emergency backup form.
So in short the forum is going down again for around 30 mins shortly after this post. If all is well we should then be back again and hopefully then maintain our existing config as it’s now been a week in the wild by way of initial testing.
I’ll update this thread upon this next maintenance session having been completed.
OK, we are are back. Again my apologies for all this server bouncing. We have limited resources and have to tread carefully. In time I hope to setup a ‘status’ subdomain where we can announce such outages, ideally on a different provider (just in case), but this requires more resources than we currently have access to: but more on that soon hopefully.
Thanks for your patience with all these background interruptions. We can hopefully now look forward to a quieter period if the existing forum config hangs in there.