SAAFE message board news

[xw5]

At the moment, it looks like no-one's getting email notifications. They will be back at some point, just not necessarily quickly.

This means that the mod service may be a bit slower than usual, sorry.

[xw5]

We're in the middle of moving SAAFE from one server to another.

I hope that it all goes without a hitch, but things may not work properly in the meantime.

We know

[xw5]

For a variety of reasons, we have moved the forum to a new server. This has not been as easy as the authors of the software claim it should be - I can give some of the techy details if you like, but it's been time.

Fortunately, this was not a surprise, so the 'old' board was kept going on the old server. When it needed to be frozen, so that no new posts would be made there, it was put into maintenance mode 

Once it was clear that the move was more or less successful on the second attempt today (and the third overall) the maintenance message was switched to say 'go to https://saafe.info/main' (note the https rather than http and no .www) i.e. here and the new one went live.

Once it was clear that it was working almost entirely to plan, the URL of the old server - www.saafe.info - was pointed at the new one and this will doubtless propagate around the Internet as such things do. A redirect is in place when they get here in case anyone uses the www.

[amy]

I've merged this with the news thread so hopefully more people will spot it. It can come down once we're all sorted .

For a variety of reasons, we have moved the forum to a new server.

Where Ian says 'we', I should point out that the full extent of my participation was sitting on my arse eating bombay mix watching tthe Sopranos and occasionally clicking on a link when asked

[xw5]

Where Ian says 'we', I should point out that the full extent of my participation was sitting on my arse eating bombay mix watching tthe Sopranos and occasionally clicking on a link when asked

Plus demanding various things that meant it had to be moved in the first place!

[xw5]

You might find that recent email notifications have ended up being treated as spam by Gmail etc.

The address they're 'from' was changed and has just been changed again to something that various email services will (should!) be less fussy about.

[xw5]

We've had some problems with GoDaddy changing where saafe.info points to and taking far too long to point it back to the right place.

They still haven't told us that they have done so and it's only through looking at the server directly that I see it's back now. Depending on just what tries to save a few milliseconds by remembering where things were earlier, it may still be unavailable via some networks for a while.

Don't use GoDaddy. As soon as we can stop doing so for the last bits that give them the power to do this, we will.

[xw5]

They'll be some 'scheduled downtime' later today to implement something.

It didn't take very long when tested elsewhere, but here has rather more posts...

[xw5]

.. done!

[xw5]

Two more bits of downtime - a couple of minutes each - recently thanks to a couple of security updates that needed a server reboot and annoyingly weren't released at the same time...

[xw5]

You may or may not have noticed a large number of 'guests' viewing the board: they topped out at 3,622 in fifteen minutes.

As a consequence everything was running very slowly today.

Looking, it appears that most of them were bots using Chinese-related software and servers. They've been blocked and while they're still trying, everything should go back to normal... until the next swarm, anyway.

[xw5]

It turns out that the SMF software that runs the message board is clever enough to stop doing some things that are quite intensive to do when lots of people are using the board.

If the 'load' it measures is above 2.5, the search is temporarily disabled in order to keep general viewing reasonably quick.

As I type now, the load is 0.26, so search, 'show me unread messages', and various maintenance tasks can all run. When the bots were busy, the load was showing as being over 25...

You can easily search the public sections by adding

site:saafe.info

to your search on Google.

[xw5]

There will be some downtime this afternoon while the operating system that runs the SAAFE server is updated.

Back soon

[xw5]

.. and back again.

Slightly longer down than I expected, but that's copying old database configuration instructions to the newer version does for you, ahem.

[xw5]

Hmm, some more downtime this evening as it turns out that the message board software can't cope with the current version of the language it's written in (!?!)

I've downgraded that bit, and it - crossed fingers - looks like it's working again.