Forum Maintenance Announcements

[number6]

Forums have been upgraded.

Please report any problems as comments to this post.

If you are unable to post, use the "contact us" link to send us an email.

NEW: OS was upgraded. We tested this on a VM before trying in production. New upgrade broke PHP being able to serve forum software.
Now forums are running in s a degraded state:
* No Email from forums: so no new user signup, and no email notice on replies to posts
* Ability to post replies or send PM are mostly broken, and will likely result in a "gateway error"

I need a nap. I will resume work on the forums later this afternoon.

[number6]

Hello everyone,

After a major upgrade of the OS, PHP stopped working with the forums, and we have to move to building from source.

Testing on a VM did not expose this problem.

Now, the forums are "up" but in degraded state.

EXISTING users should be able to login and read posts but may not be able to send PM or add posts/replies, but NEW users can't sign up until I resolve an issue with email messages from forums working from PHP without failing.

There may also be issues with the image processing libraries, which may break upload of images, and the Captcha for user signup.

Without email, you won't get notifications of replies to your posts, or threads, either.

Sorry about the bad news and loss of service.

I need to take a nap, and get back to this later this afternoon.

[number6]

Hello,
Sorry about the down time.

The forums have been down from 9:55pm pacific time on June 17 until noon June 18.

We completed a test of the forum OS upgrade on a VM and found problems, then resolved them, reset to snapshot to confirm the process worked, but the VM was not a perfect match to what we have in production. When we upgraded the OS on the production server, the upgrade broke PHP and its ability to run our forum software. We had to switch over to building PHP from source. We are now running our own PHP build and the forums appear to be working.

Please report any problems you see with forums since this upgrade.

Things I have tested and found working:
* The forums can send email
* CAPTCHA images are still displayed
* I can post and reply to posts
* PM appear to work

If you find otherwise, please let us know!

[number6]

Forum maintenance completed earlier, here is what has happened:

Forum software has been upgraded with new version from vendor.

Public facing items fixed:
* JQuery upgrade/updated
* Resolved an issue where Articles were sorted by the last comment date and not published date.
* Renamed the Activity Stream module on the default Home Page to Forum Home module. This better reflects its purpose.
* Updated node parsing to prevent extraneous JSON from appearing after attachment deletion.
* Resolved an issue where Code, BBCode can have an improper height.
* Resolved an issue that prevented pagination on the Members List when using a non-English language.
* Resolved an issue that could show incorrect content based on caching and the use of is_member_of() based conditionals.

I've tested email notifications, posting new threads, replying to existing threads, Blog posts, browsing, uploading attachments of various types, inclusion of youtube links for video play.
I've not found new problems since the upgrade.
If you find problem, reply here. If you can't reply here, try emailing: defconforums@gmail.com
Thanks!

[The Dark Tangent]

We are in the middle of moving the server from one network to another, and while we work on everything one system at a time the forums will be without email for a few days.

This means new user signups will be broken until email is working again! Sorry for the inconvenience!

[number6]

DT made some changes for the new network and as of "now" mail from forums is working.
Also, the weird delay when posting replies, and no page reload to show success, and a sometimes "504 error" with strange CSS overlay issues, but if you manually force-reload the page, the post is there? That problem appears to be gone too.
Please report problems you have with the forums.
If you can't post here, you can email us at forum at defcon dot org.

[The Dark Tangent]

The big pre-con network updates are mostly all complete, This means we should be in our almost-final state leading up to Safe Mode!

If you notice any strange network timeouts or issues please let us know. We updated switches, the firewall, the server, and even some network cables. Everything *looks* ok but you know how the network bugs 🐛🐞 are.

Next up is an update to the iOS and Android mobile applications next week.

[number6]

Forum maintenance completed between 6:12am Pacific time and 6:30am Pacific Time. Estimated down-time was around 5 minutes.
Please report problems you see with forums.

One known issue, for which there is progress:
When you try a password reset ( https://forum.defcon.org/lostpw ) , and you complete the Captcha, you see an error like:

Invalid server response.

Please try again.

Before today, there were reports no email was sent. Now, email messages are sent when that error appears, but the error still appears.
I'm still working on that issue.
Please report any other problems you see with the forums. If you are unable to post your issues here, feel free to email us: forum@defcon.org

[number6]

Forum maintenance completed. Please let us know if you see something is broken. If you are unable to post a reply or send a DM, you can contact us at defconforums@gmail.com or forum@defcon.org and let us know.

[number6]

Major OS upgrade completed: Aug 27 from 2:30pm until 5pm: core OS, kernel, binaries and and libs upgraded.
Web server service upgraded.
PHP rebuilt.
Forum Software upgrade completed: Aug 27 from 6:00pm until 6:30pm, then work to test and validate up until 7:00pm
Forums open for service at 6:30pm

Please let us know if you see something is broken. If you are unable to post a reply or send a DM, you can contact us at defconforums@gmail.com or forum@defcon.org and let us know.

[number6]

Minor update completed to software forums uses. Basic tests have not indicated anything is broken. Please let me know if you see otherwise. You can reply here, or send me a "DM" or email defconforums@gmail.com or forum@defcon.org with new problems you have found since this upgrade.

Thanks!

[number6]

Forum software upgrade has been completed.

Forums are open for service. Please let us know if you find new issues.
Edit: changes:
* Posting: attachment system now uses new lib for all image content uploaded to the server allowing for easier, more understandable content appearing as you type and edit it
* Topic display includes "photos tab" to see media in a topic
* Media albums in user profiles should work and look better
* Assuming their change works, JavaScript is required for the login to work

[The Dark Tangent]

This latest update should fix a bunch of photo album display quirks and make them much more usable.

Because of this I'll start to add pictures from Safe Mode and want to encourage people to upload more pictures in albums to help test. Thanks!

[number6]

OS upgrade to forum server completed. Rebuild of web server and php to use new libs has been completed. Please report any new problems you encounter.
Thanks!

[The Dark Tangent]

We have updated the web server and optimized the configurations as well as updated OpenSSL and the base OS.

Please let us know if you see any strangeness!