All - I wanted to first apologize for the recent outage with the site/forums. If you've been around for any length of time you'll know that an outage like this rarely happens.

I want to make sure that everyone knows that Roy and I are still dedicated to the site and forums. We know how important it is to the community, even after all these years.

If you want to know the details of what went wrong, read on. Otherwise, please rest assured that the site and forums are here to stay. We can't of course guarantee no down time ever, that just wouldn't be realistic. We do appreciate how much knowledge that this community has built over the last decade (or more). I also want people to know that the Roy is able to get a hold of me outside of the forums. Also, even though I'm not on the forums much anymore, I'm still very much connected to them and I know when things go wrong.

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The site/forums are registered with Dreamhost, and at one point they used to be hosted with Dreamhost as well. Many, many years ago I had the site/forums hosted on dedicated servers to accommodate the bandwidth and usage needs. It cost me a couple hundred each month and as you know I've been very deliberate about keeping annoying ads out of the forums (unlike many other forums). My desire has never been to make money from this, just to provide a service to the community. After a while Roy and I found out that we could leverage ibiblio (thanks ibiblio!) to host the site/forums for free. I changed from a dedicated hosting plan with dreamhost to a regular shared server plan (to have the site/forums hosted on ibiblio, but the domain registration/renewals and DNS stayed with dreamhost). For some reason I couldn't just "change hosting plans" with my dreamhost account, I had to create a new account, move the sites/domains/registrations/DNS over and close the old account. This is where the problem apparently started...

I received an email a couple weeks ago (can't remember the exact date, but that's when the site went down) saying oesf.org has been deleted from the registry (as well as elsix.org, zaurususergroup.org and a couple other domains). There was no explanation or anything... just that it was deleted. I worked with dreamhost support to have them explain what the hell went wrong and apparently they didn't complete the move of the domain registration/renewls from my old (dedicated server) account to the new (shared hosting) account. Because of this, the annual domain renewals for the last couple years had not been paid. They never emailed me saying, 'hey, you have an outstanding balance' or notified me within the dreamhost control panel. They didn't say anything for years!

Because the domain was deleted from the registry, it of course went down completely. After working with (the largely incompetent) dreamhost support team (all via email, they have no phone support) they told me that I had to pay the past due domain renewals AND I had to pay $100 per domain for redemption, or wait 60 or so days for the sites to become available to re-register. This to me was complete bullshit. They didn't let me know that I owed anything, didn't let me know that the sites would be deleted.. no communication prior to them all being deleted. Yet, I got the email saying that they had been deleted... so they did know how to email me (it's not like they had an old email).

I immediately paid the past due renewals (rightfully mine to pay) but told them that I would not pay for the $100 redemption fees for each domain. I told them that because of their screw up (many) they should cover the costs. Ultimately I got to a support manager and he agreed that they had made the mistake and agreed to cover the redemption. I would have paid the redemption for oesf.org just to get it back online, but had I done so I wouldn't have any leverage to get them to reimburse me.

Dreamhost has fixed the account and the domain is setup for auto renewal (like all of my other domains). I haven't been happy with dreamhost for a while now, and last year registered/created a site with godaddy.com. In the near future, I will be migrating oesf (and my other domains) to godaddy. Dreamhost doesn't deserve my business anymore.

All,

As you probably already noticed the skin/theme/layout of OESF is a little different. Well I figured out that the issue we were facing with slowness is caused by a line in the default skin. What I did was set the skin to an alternate until I get to the bottom of all this.

Well until next time....

Late

It seems that things have been running very smooth lately. Some spam, but it's been nailed pretty well thanks to our admin/mod team.

The question I'm posing to you guys is is there anything that you want added or changed? I'm going to be upgrading us to the latest version of IPB soon, but I'm pretty sure it's just bugfixes and not features or anything.

new OpenMoko forum created after requested. I merged the three OpenZaurus forums as they're quite low traffic, and the 6000 and 6000-hardware also merged as there's been a lot of overlap.

Just wanted to wish everyone a safe and happy holiday. 2007 was a rocky year for us, but we seem to be settled in now so 2008 should hopefully be smooth sailing. I also wanted to give a special thanks to the Wiki staff for taking charge and managing the wiki. I don't know much in that area, so I really appreciate them doing that. Make sure you guys thank them if you happen to stumble into their forum

Anyway, be safe and have fun. I'll toast a drink to this fine community come New Years

Roy

Ok, just thought I'd give you guys some updates on the latest happenings here.

First off, if you haven't noticed, we've switched to the latest version of IPB. With that comes some additional user features, lots of security and anti-spam updates and misc. administrative stuff. Our Admin Control Panel has been practically completely rewritten and is much, much easier for us to use. Registration now has a captcha involved and allows us to let users openly register without admin approval. The board itself seems to be running much faster. All in all, it's a very worthwhile upgrade and I'm happy it went as it did.

I've also changed the default theme to a modification I did of the IP.Professional theme. I think it's a little cleaner for the boards and makes us look a little more professional. You guys are free to use any theme you like (use the dropdown at the bottom left to change it), but that's going to be the default one for guests and new users. If there are any huge objections let me know.

There is 1 outstanding issue left and it's out of my hands. The forums right now are in, well, 'forum'. This is a NFS issue that we had the 'priveledge' of finding for Ibiblio and they're doing their best to work on it. Basically I used the 'mv' command to move the testing forums from the 'forum' folder where I had been testing them back to 'forums'. This triggered some kind of bug and left us where we're at. They will eventually be moved back to the 'forums' folder, but I'm waiting on Ibiblio for everything. That's the only forum issue I know of right now.

The Wiki has also been upgraded to the latest MediaWiki version. I'm not going to claim to be any kind of expert in that area, but from what it seems it's good. With that I've also added 2 new admins to it: Meyer and Tux. They'll be overseeing the Wiki stuff and making sure things don't get out of hand. Right now I'm not sure if I want to integrate the user databases for the forum and the Wiki. I think it might be better to leave them separate in case we ever have to split the two up or something. I do intent to install a captcha for the Wiki registration and hopefully will get to that this weekend.

Outstanding issues for the Wiki are the captcha and it seems the image gallery is broken. Stuff that I'll look at this weekend.

Finally, we added a new user group in the Asia section. It's the Japanese User Group and is going to be watched over by Meyer. As we discussed in the initial thread, users are welcome to speak in Japanese or English in there. That goes for any of the user groups obviously. We're not about to dictate to you guys how you communicate. All we ask is that if something beneficial to the community happens, translate for rest of us

Thank you all for bearing with me as I do these upgrades. Hopefully things will be a smooth ride from here on out and we can get back to the normal routine around here.

Roy
OESF Admin Team

Ok, the forum should be fully upgraded now.

I broke the Wiki. Not really broke. I just need to figure out the command to run PHP5 from the command line. Anyway, let me know how the forum runs please.

Also, all validating accounts were deleted. Users can now freely register without us having to validate them.

Edit:

Things to fix

1. Images in Posts Broken. I have a post in the IPB forums about it. If I dont get a response, I'll file a ticket with them and have them fix it.
2. Attachments seem to be disconnected. I will fix this and if not, I will get the IPB Techs to fix it for us.
3. Wiki
4. Move forum back to 'forums'. I have a ticket open with Ibiblio about this issue. There is no 'forums' folder on the actual drive.. what the heck is the http forums table linking to?

Done. Looks like everything is good to go now, so let me know if there are any issues.

Well, 4 WAS fixed. Now it's broken again, so site is back to 'forum'. Ibiblios official response:

From Ibiblio.org


Hopefully this wont be tooooooo long :-)

Late

From Ibiblio.org



Sorry for the inconvenience!

Late

As usual, life's been busy as usual for me since my move down to Texas. New job, new house blah blah excuses whatever who cares. Anyway, I'm trying to set aside a couple days to just fix everything that's broken on this site. I'm shooting for this weekend, but please don't shoot me if I can't.

I am aware of the attachments issue. Is there anything else? Anything you guys want added? Give me a nice laundry list of stuff to do and order it by priority.

Things to note:
- I don't have access to the old stuff, Mike does. This means that any missing files are out of my reach.
- The site might be down at times if I need to replace something. Expect outages.
- I would love to upgrade to the latest IPB, but I need to find the files and I dont have access to our customer portal. I'll do my best on that end.
- Texas is much hotter than back home.

From ibiblio.org



Late

*****ATTENTION******

From ibiblio.org



Just a note

Sorry for the inconvenience

Late

******ATTENTION******

sorry, it was a minor config issue (changed directories) that took longer than expected to find.

all existing attachments are downloadable again and you can upload new files as well.

enjoy

Yippee! That wasn't too hard. I had some troubles with the slightly different versions of mysql servers (the ibiblio server barfed at a few of the default settings from the dreamhost server).

Thanks for everyone's patience!

offroadgeek

OK... everything is ready and I'll be moving the site right now (12/12/2006 ~4pm CDT).

While the move is happening, I will be locking the forums so that people can still access the forum in a read only mode.

I will also keep the forum locked and available via the server's IP address until DNS fully propogates: 64.111.96.127.

Thanks for your patience while we go through this transition.