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"We're working on it..."

ancientdad

Administrator
Staff member
Joined
May 22, 2020
Total Posts
24,364
Total likes
2,461
Location
Nature Coast, FL
Yeah, that's what they all say. Right?

We really are. We know there have been a few glitches since our server migration and most of them have been minor and/or tolerable, but like our favorite vintage Honda twins it still (and probably will always) needs a little tweaking.

That said, we made a change today that seems to have improved the speed of which most things happen here at VHT, and hopefully will clear up some other little issues too. Unfortunately, as often happens with software, it also had a side-effect. Seems our add-on system of "likes" for posts was an unexpected victim of the change.

We're working on it... :)
 
Thanks for the update AD, always a few hiccups with any kind of move or change like that. Appreciate all the time and effort you guys put in.
 
Thanks for the update AD, always a few hiccups with any kind of move or change like that. Appreciate all the time and effort you guys put in.

Thanks Perry, and a result of one of our adjustments today was the "thanks" (like) add-on got messed up for a bit but we figured out how to fix it. Work in progress, of course :)
 
Well, I wasn't sure if it was just affecting me or if others noticed it too, but all day today I've seen a slowdown in posting times and usually getting a message "Are you sure you want to leave?", and if you leave the page it often double-posts.

Turns out our server host is doing maintenance this weekend and has asked that we bear with them as they update security and move databases to new hosts, which could be finished later tomorrow (Sunday) or Monday.

Thanks for everyone's patience.

AD
 
Well, apparently true to their word, as of late last night our forum performance is back to as normal as things can be for our older software. I'm having zero issues with posting and replying to posts, no messages or double-posting as was happening for most of the weekend while our host was doing more maintenance.
 
NOTICE: Site maintenance at 5 pm EDT

This is intended to help us be proactive so members won't get surprised by another short outage.

Our server host is going to reboot our server and thankfully, has given us some notice.

IN LESS THAN 10 MINUTES FROM NOW, THE SITE WILL GO DOWN FOR A FEW MINUTES SO THEY CAN ACCOMPLISH THEIR MAINTENANCE.

Thanks for your understanding.
 
Well, we had another server outage for about 5 minutes just now.

We are on a shared server and occasionally they have to reboot the server due to much higher traffic by the others we share it with.... one of the downsides of being low budget.

Thanks for everyone's patience.
 
This crap is really getting old. Again today, not more than 10 minutes ago, we had yet another totally unexpected outage of roughly 5 minutes and this time, a message I've not yet seen on an otherwise plain white web page:

'An unexpected database error occurred. Please try again later.'

Clearly there is no database error as everything is normal once it comes back up again. Literally, in the time it took me to log into our server host account and start a ticket, things were back up again.

Except all 15 to 20 members online were gone, of course, along with the many guests who were reading various pages. I'm really tired of this and if we weren't locked into a contract for the next 20 months or so I'd start looking for a new home again.

But I wanted everyone to understand what just happened. Again, sorry for the PITA and thanks for your patience.
 
You have my sympathy and understanding.

Many years ago, in a galaxy so far away that I've forgotten most of the details, I wrote a multi user database, in a language no one since seems to have heard about, ( TAS+ Developer)* running on a Novell Netware 386 server that I built ( sorry, assembled ) myself, over an ethernet network that I installed myself. This was not really in my job description as a lab technician ( aka Biomedical Scientist for pay negotiations ), but it made a pleasant change from real work. Not so pleasant when I got moans from the users when I was doing 'essential maintenance', or locking their files and print jobs.

And then the happy day arrived when the IT department realised what I was up to, and decided that my system would be better looked after by 'professional IT technicians', rather than by a self taught amateur. So the contents of my home made server got migrated onto a bit of spare space on one of their proper servers. Said migration did not go smoothly, partly my fault for taking a days leave in a huff on the change over date.

From then on, when the system went down, the users still blamed me, but at least then I was able to blame the IT guys.

Later on, we eventually installed a commercial LIMS, and I went back to doing my proper job. I say proper job, but in order to progress up the career path it involved leaving the lab bench behind and flying a desk as a 'manager' <spit>, a job so crap that I sought and took early retirement, and promptly forgot about most of the computer stuff.

* all Dos based, but ran happily enough in a window under the last semi reliable incarnation of Windows ( 3.0 ??? - it's so long ago I've completely forgotten which )
 
One of the side benefits of running our own network and server was the many happy hours spent playing networked deathmatch games of DooM, Quake and Duke Nukem against some of my younger colleagues. I cheated, by putting a sound card ( this was in the days when PC's didn't have sound built into the motherboard, and hard disks and RAM came in mb rather than gbs ) into 'my' PC, so I could hear them creeping up on me.

All this had to cease once the IT dept took over, and coffee breaks became much shorter and more boring.
 
By now I'm sure everyone realizes we had yet another server outage overnight and into today. A total of roughly 14 hours of downtime due in part to their apparent inability to communicate with each other about what each team was doing at what time. Not an encouraging experience.

I have verbally thrashed them as much as can be expected about this garbage, but of course they hold all the cards - and our money. You pay for 3 years in advance with great expectations, and once they have the money you have zero leverage.

So, my apologies once again... maybe one day we'll find a host we can afford that actually lives up to their claims.
 
By now I'm sure everyone realizes we had yet another server outage overnight and into today. A total of roughly 14 hours of downtime due in part to their apparent inability to communicate with each other about what each team was doing at what time. Not an encouraging experience.

I have verbally thrashed them as much as can be expected about this garbage, but of course they hold all the cards - and our money. You pay for 3 years in advance with great expectations, and once they have the money you have zero leverage.

So, my apologies once again... maybe one day we'll find a host we can afford that actually lives up to their claims.
I thought the world had stopped spinning because I couldn't log in for a day.....
 
I always tell my management that I only ever get one chance to make us look good in front of the customer. Why, oh why, am I the only one who understands the importance of this?
 
I have verbally thrashed them as much as can be expected about this garbage, but of course they hold all the cards - and our money. You pay for 3 years in advance with great expectations, and once they have the money you have zero leverage.

So, my apologies once again... maybe one day we'll find a host we can afford that actually lives up to their claims.
Before you worry or complain too much, remember what you just came from to get here. This is light years ahead. I notice that the rate of new people joining seems to be on the upswing. l would guess that is because this platform is more workable.
 
Before you worry or complain too much, remember what you just came from to get here. This is light years ahead. I notice that the rate of new people joining seems to be on the upswing. l would guess that is because this platform is more workable.
Very true. Between the antique software and our old server host things got pretty miserable at times.
 
Before you worry or complain too much, remember what you just came from to get here. This is light years ahead. I notice that the rate of new people joining seems to be on the upswing. l would guess that is because this platform is more workable.
Absolutely agreed Ray, the new software has definitely helped in many ways. But, we've already had nearly half as many hours of downtime in a year and a half with our current host as we had with our original host who was working with 20 year old equipment and even worse communication habits from a single location in Central Florida. Our current host has a presence in the US and Europe, so it was supposed to be more reliable.
 
I guess there was another outage somewhere between your last post and my post now. We may need to visit this new provider as a group.
 
Moving to a different host can be scary/difficult. But a potential option for you is Azure, AWS or Oracle. The only issue with the cloud platforms is you will need someone to move it for you. They don't offer those kinds of services. The reason those services are relatively cheap is there is practically no support on configuration. They just guarantee to it to be available.

With that said the site is just a SQL DB, with PHP and a web server. Someone competent in configuring those services should be able to do it with minimal pain. You'll have to also configure the DNS to point to the new IP. Another advantage is that the site itself is minimal in terms of resources SERVED to the client so it's unlikely you will hit max connection limits and bandwidth limits unless the site grows to SOHC4 forum levels. Even then, for the cloud services it's easy to allocate to a larger resource. Literally a button click.
 
Sorry, forgot to add this, but I've been using Azure and Oracle for literally years and have never had a single minute of downtime. Both are very reliable. Oracle DOES have support but it is pricey. I'd say Oracle is literally the best. They have to be because they have a rich history of serving enterprise businesses and their support is priced accordingly, they're also in competition with IBMs cloud services so they have to try much harder when they're #2. Same with Azure/Microsoft being #2 to AWS. :)
 
Thanks for the thoughts. We need to do something, I'm so sick of this crap I could scream at the first person I spoke to at our current host. At least our first host had a halfway decent excuse, 20 year old equipment they should/could have upgraded over the years but apparently did not. Moving might be scary, but it went pretty well when we moved to where we are now. Scary to me is waking up finding out your forum is down, and sitting around waiting to find out something - anything - from people who already have your money and suck at communicating what the hell they're doing to bring it back up.

But we have budget constraints to consider, so for the foreseeable future we'll be in a similar spot unless we get lucky.
 
Might be worth paying a consultant who specializes in Azure or AWS to see what the monthly operating costs are.

I pay $50/mo but that's because I'm using an Windows Server VM because I run a lot of custom applications for my server. For SQL and Web Apps it's significantly cheaper and they charge you based on bandwidth and storage space.

Personally I prefer Azure. AWS has an awful interface in my opinion.
 
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