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[The Shed]

Welcome back .
Thanks to Wittsend and all those involved in keeping us online.
For anyone like me whose limitations end at the keyboard the 'team behind the scenes' are much appreciated. 

[jkhackney]

Thanks for getting it done and keeping it going! I wish I were as competent at computing!

Now the important business:

Do we get an extension on our May photo of the month? Or can we just post photos from the end of May into June? Some of us didn't see the sun since Easter and the final week of May gave us a first opportunity ...



-Jeremy

[Dopey]

Well you tried at least, as you know.... God loves a tryer

[crumbly65]

Thank you are words that seem a little too inadequate Alan, for the restoration of our Forum.

The enormity of the (fortunately) temporary loss of this oasis of sanity in an increasingly insane and unstable world, had me considering going into a monkish retreat…..

Happy days are here again.

[andyjb]

Thanks everyone. Glad to see us all back.

[Alice B]

Thank you for all your hard work Alan

[Roverscotty]

As a new member I must say THANK YOU! After paying for the subscription and then learning the the forum was not operating, I thought to myself
hmmmmmmm.

Again thank you all.

Scotty

[Rustandoil]

Thank you for sorting whatever the issue was.

What about this new version of the forum software, what new features might we have?

Mind you there ain't much wrong with it as it is 👍🏻

[Exile]

Glad to see it back.
Thank you to all concerned.

Another "new" forum in the offing?

Oh no!
After the shenanigans of re-registering on this one - and seemingly losing members from the previous one, I hope we can keep this one for a while yet.

New features?

Unless it can make toast, do I really need them.....

[Simon1959]

Thanks all for sorting and getting back online, we have missed it - you don't know what you got till it's gone springs to mind!

One feature that I would appreciate, would be the addition of the link to unread posts to feature at the bottom of the reading pane. There is a next/previous link there now. It would save me scrolling back up to the top of the page to find unread posts. Hope that makes sense.

Many thanks

[2286]

Very sorry for the prolonged outage 

This was not of my or the Wittsend Elves doings.

Our ISP suggested we move to what's called a VM (virtual machine) server.
The migration failed - dismally - as you know.
We don't seem to have lost any posts - just the best part of a week with no forum to look at or post on.

Our ISP have restored us and put us back on the old server.


 
The moral of the story is:
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
If ever there was a lesson to be learnt 

The good news is I have a brand new forum using the latest SMF package - ready to go - which I can now develop at my leisure.
This would mean starting again and you would have to re-register - this is what we did back in 2019 with this version of the forum.

 

When do we need to migrate across?

It was disconcerting to keep getting the somethings gone wrong message!

Glad its been mended for now.  Exile has made me hungry with his mention of toast.

[MrTDiy]

Woohoo great to have the forum back….thanks Alan for all your work

[LN11AAB498A]

Well done & thanks for getting it running again, it sounds like it`s been quite an ordeal.

Thinking technology can do just about anything, my analogue brain doesn`t understand the need to re-register onto a new forum. What is it that makes it impossible to migrate `us` onto it? Just thinking about my question, I probably won`t understand the answer either 

PS. Featured heavily in national news this week, can we blame A I (artificial intelligence) for causing the problem? If `it` could lead to "human extinction", what chance does our forum have?  https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/30/media/artificial-intelligence-warning-reliable-sources/index.html

[Wittsend]

It's difficult to explain.

Simply, our ISP suggested/wanted to move us from one computer box to another.
Our original/old box - the one we are operating form NOW is a real physical box in a rack in a data centre.
Our ISP moved us to a new box. This new box is actually a virtual box (VM virtual machine). Lots of VMs can live and operate more efficiently and they all sit inside a big box in a virtual world.

The problem came about because for whatever reason, our migration to this new VM box failed. Why we don't know yet.

Sadly our ISP didn't think to test the new box worked with all our systems.
Everything worked except the green forum you are looking at now.
Arguably the most important bit of the S2C online services.

Our forum runs from a big database that stores everything you see on here and new posts (data) are being added all the time in teal time. To work the forum - to access this database there are many files needed with various setting to interface with the database and then to get the forum to "look" and display what you see there are thousands of files. Everything has to be synchronised and get anything out of sync you get white screens, sometimes with error messages 

Our ISP then had to restore everything back into our old server box.
This took them rather a long time 

And that's where we are today.
The ISP still want to move us to a VM box.
However - we shall insist that any new server is thoroughly tested and all the apps (apps that run the behind the scene systems) are installed and the settings correct to run our online systems.

I did nothing - all I did was test things and report back what wasn't working and what settings needed changing.

As we all know:
If it ain't broke don't fix it.
The argument for moving to a VM box/servcie is compelling - but is going to be hard to sell after our experience of the past few days.

I know there are keyboard warriors out there who think we - me as webmaster are a load of muppets.
Clearly these knockers have never run online services such as we have. It's easy to mock and poke fun, but they know nothing.
The LRSOC had a similar outage the other week. I have no idea what exactly their problem was.
Back in 2019 we had to start off this version of the forum due to outside influences.
Before that we nearly lost the forum due to a WordPress installation that went wrong.
(we want to install WordPress so we can update our website appearance and we want to integrate our online services with Crossmember (the system that runs our membership processing) so that forum and website access accounts are automatically created when new members join the club.

Lets hope our migration goes well next time we try it.


 

 

[Dopey]

They should have known, with the name Land Rover in it, it wasn't going to work right the first time.....