We were down for a wee bit on Saturday

[Alastair]

The community was down for a wee bit today. We were installing some new software which required us to reboot the server twice and each time that took around 30 minutes to come back.

We still don't understand why it takes so long as it should just take a couple of minutes. The secomd time we rebooted we were watching the process and it seemed to us it got stuck. So we brought it down again to do a hard disk check and we found there were bad sectors on the disk which have now been repaired. We think that is why it was taking so long to reboot as it could have hit one of these bad sectors and so kept trying until it timed out.

We're not sure if that fixed the problem or not but the next time we do a reboot we'll find out.

As it happens we will be moving all the data from this server to a new one shortly.

Alastair

[sandyc]

Re: We were down for a wee bit on Saturday

Hi Al, I did notice that there was a problem because I got an error message the first time I tried to logon. I just thought you were doing some "work".

Sandy

[Alastair]

Re: We were down for a wee bit on Saturday

It's really part of the work we are trying to do for the ongoing building and security of the sytem. We have built a mirror server with a raid hard disk system and we plan to do a fresh install of the operating system and then transfer all our data over to it. This will become our new server. Then we'll take the current system, replace ths suspect hard disk and then mirror all the contents of the new server onto it.

As part of this process we also intend to get the new ScotCards and ScotGenealogy onto the main ElectricScotland.com domain and thus ditch those domains.

We also intend to have the new mobile suite installed for the community with the Facebook app installed and a couple of other new facilities. Once all that is done and mirrored we'll then send the mirror server to Simon Fraser University.

We had also hoped to have the new comment system installed but we've now heard back from the software company and they tell us their system won't run on a windows server platform. We're not totally convinced it won't but frankly they are a pretty useless company when it comes to technical support. Steve was sure that if he could talk to the programmers that we could get it to work but they seem very reluctant to let us talk to them. So it's either find a solution ourselves or find another program. The problem is that their sendmail program won't talk to the smtp program for getting emails out. The thing is that windows has released a windows version of the sendmail program which is why we think it should work if we can just get the configuration information.

I might add here that the whole point of this system is that it will allow people to interact with individual pages of out site. So for clans you could bookmark the clan history page and then add comments to it and people can respond. It's almost like a social networking system but based on an individual page. You'd be able to share information with the various social networks and there is even an RSS option should you want to subscribe to a particular page. That also means clans could do announcements.

We still have issues with the Comcast folk and Steve's just phoned to say they will put us on a dedicated router which they believe will fix the problems once and for all. It's apparently a new router and looks like we'll be a beta tester for them on this but it has much more capacity that the one they use currently. They are going to test this with Steve between midnight and 4 am EST this Monday (tomorrow). This has ended up taking a lot of our time to resolve this bandwidth issue so if this gets solved we'll then be able to march ahead with the other things that need doing.

Bandwidth is like a pipe in that we need a wide pipe for the bandwidth to flow down so if you have too small a pipe then the data can backup as it were and not allow some data to get through or take a much longer time to transfer. That needs to be solved so that people can get onto the site easily and quickly. Curently the system gets chocked and doesn't allow some visitors to get through.

So... that's a bit of an update for you and others that might be interested.

Alastair

[sandyc]

Re: We were down for a wee bit on Saturday

Hi Al, takes me back...
I don't really miss those types of challenges. I'll just stick to moaning now:wink:
Sandy