Messages

1

OESF Announcements / DNS renewal 2017

« on: November 05, 2017, 08:58:52 am »

Sorry I missed this thread until now.  I have OESF set to auto-renew every year, it's not a big deal at all.

That reminds me, I do need to get Paul (and others?) admin access to dreahmost.

2

OESF Announcements / Recent Site Outage

« on: April 10, 2010, 02:22:45 pm »

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.

------
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.

3

OESF Announcements / Whats Needs To Be Fixed?

« on: June 17, 2007, 10:54:53 am »

I by no means started the community... it was around long before I bought my first 5500.  I simply tried to help out where ever I could.

4

OESF Announcements / Whats Needs To Be Fixed?

« on: June 16, 2007, 09:43:06 am »

God, I hate that I haven't been on in ages.  Work is just all consuming now and it will just get worse as I may be moving to India for a year...

I will get dz access to everything I have (which should be everything), but we also need help with the sites.

I would like to hand over 'ownership' of the sites so they can be better maintained, but I would only do this with a select few people that have been here for years.  I'll PM them to see if there is interest.

5

General Discussion / Larger Attachments?

« on: January 21, 2007, 11:55:36 am »

I've just changed it so that ~50mb files can be attached.  If people abuse this I'll put it back to a lower size.

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OESF Announcements / Spaaaaaam

« on: January 20, 2007, 10:38:24 pm »

I have changed it so that an admin will have to validate all new users until I get the forum software upgraded.  Hopefully the newer version will help combat the spam.

The upgrade will happen within the next couple days and will require some downtime.

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OESF Announcements / Attachments/uploads Are Fixed!

« on: January 03, 2007, 10:57:53 am »

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

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Site Suggestions, Requests, and Updates / Fix The Attachments

« on: December 25, 2006, 04:10:33 pm »

it will be fixed.. please be patient.  I am going to finish having xmas with my family and I'll get to it tomorrow

9

OESF Announcements / Site & Forum Move Complete

« on: December 24, 2006, 11:03:57 am »

hopefully we won't have to move again as ibiblio is completely free.

very sorry about the long delay in getting the forums back online.  there was a problem between dreamhost and ibiblio which I finally got resolved on two days ago.

enjoy and happy holidays!

10

OESF Announcements / Site & Forum Move Complete

« on: December 13, 2006, 04:39:54 pm »

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

11

OESF Announcements / Site Move Happening On 12/12/2006

« on: December 12, 2006, 04:52:58 pm »

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.

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OESF Announcements / Site Maintenance

« on: December 03, 2006, 11:44:53 am »

the site was down for (probably) a few hours this morning... it looked like the automated log rotation failed and it clogged things up.  we're back now.

I'm also going to be moving the site to the ibiblio servers very soon (maybe today), so there will be more outage while dns is updating.

please bear with us.

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OESF Announcements / Site Down-age...

« on: July 12, 2006, 11:27:58 am »

Yep, all of the sites on the dedicated server were down for a short while.  I noticed it shortly after 9am (CDT).

Apparently something had eaten up all of the memory and the server just slowed to a crawl.  We had to bounc the server and everything came back up quickly.  I'm working with Dreamhost suppor to get rid of anything unnecessary processes.

Sorry for the troubles!

14

Site Suggestions, Requests, and Updates / Dawg Don't Hunt

« on: June 17, 2006, 02:40:30 pm »

The server has been working great ever since we disabled locate on the box... I'll delete the extra posts...

I also received all 9 PMs from you

15

OESF Announcements / Found Problem With Server

« on: May 26, 2006, 10:02:26 pm »

We think we found the issue which has been causing the site to clock or completly timeout in the mornings.  Apparently updatedb has been running daily to refresh the locate db and the process lingered for several hours eating up memory and cpu utilization.  Since we obviously don't need to use locate on the server (as much as we need responsiveness!) we've removed it from cron.

Hopefully this will fix the issue.  This however doesn't mean that we'll continue to stay on the dreamhost dedicated server indefinitrely.  We'll continue to persue moving the site to ibiblio.