PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

From 3:00am until 6:00am, the forums and pics.defcon.org will be unavailable for major scheduled maintenance.

If it all works as it should, it could take as little as 30 minutes.

If not, it could take up to 3 hours for all of the work to complete.

This maintenance may not happen if converge is still working on what he was planning for tonight.

[converge]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

start of maintenance was delayed considerably tonight, pushing back to Monday night and will have ducks in order to ninja strike it.

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

I'll start my 3:00am maintenance now then.

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

I'll start my 3:00am maintenance now then.

Took over 1 hour, just to move some data around.

This was a significant system alteration. If you notice any problems with the forums of pics being down, please email us at defconforums@gmail.com

If the forums are working, just strangely, just reply here.

Thanks! :-)

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

We have at least 3 people working on different kinds of maintenance related to the forums.

More maintenance coming up. Converge might have something for Monday. (See his post above.)

Monday, I will perform maintenance for testforums, and pics unrelated to converge's work on the primary forum. Assuming my work is happy, Tuesday will see my maintenance on the main forums space.

I should have posted this earlier, but other work on the network may take place today and the next few days too. These will likely be so brief (few minutes) that they may not be announced.

If all goes well, we won't need more major maintenance like this for a few months.

I guess this is "Spring Cleaning" for techies. :-)

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

The forums continue to run, and the Server is still running, but there have been problems with a network filter. It is a known problem and someone is working on this.

While they are working on that, I've been working on the prep for changes to the environment used by forums, test forums and pics, so that the change-over to the new environment will be quick.

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

Maintenance on testforums looks good. Tests seem to show things will be fine when the same changes are applied to the production forums. (Good.)

Saturday will see a downtime (probably 1-15 minutes or less) in the present forums.

Saturday will see a downtime in https://pics.defcon.org/ (probably for 1-3 hours.)

Network outages are still pending, as maintenance to the related devices have not been completed. (I just got word of this today.)

Most of the "big items" on my plate are done. If all goes well, my maintenance run will be done Saturday. (Then, I can snicker from the shadows as the other two people while they continue with their maintenance. ]:> Obviously, I better not snicker too loudly, or else they might put more stuff on my plate. :-o )

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

Will begin work on production forums at 1:30pm Pacific time. They should be back by 1:45pm if not earlier.

Work on http://pics.defcon.org will begin at 2:00pm and should be done by 5:00pm, even though it probably won't take nearly so long.

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

Copying huge files took longer than expected.

Will begin work on pics.defcon.org at 2:30pm pacific time.

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

Work on https://pics.defcon.org/ completed.

Now I get to snicker from the shadows. ]:>

[converge]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

Going down for maintenance as planned. Back in a bit.

--edit: Forums back up approx 12:30 PDT.. very short downtime for maintenace and all should be harmonious.

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

I need to take the forums and pics down for maintenance of software used by the forums. Down time shouldn't be more than about 10 minutes, but may be longer if there are problems.

Maintenance window: starts 9:00pm May 23, 2007 until 1:00am Pacific time the next day. Pics and forums may bd down occasionally during this time, but will probably be up more than they are down.

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

Maintenance complete. Downtime for each was about 60 seconds.

Hoo-Ray for planning. :-)

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

Forum crash left forums and pics down from Sunday night until this morning.

Looking at the logs, it looks to me like hardware failure of the disk itself (such as a physical defect on the media, or the entire drive), cables, RAID controller, or something unrelated to the drives that I have not considered.

If it is hardware like the Hard Drives, then we can expect this to happen again.

I'm nearly finished with an offsite copy of all of the forum and pics data, so we can rebuild a forums box with this copy if there is total failure of a drive.

Pics and forums will be activated soon.

No posts appear to have been lost, but there was corruption in the PM tables of the DB, and the last few PM may have been lost. (Still investigating this.)

Forums are ready for use.

[TheCotMan]

Re: All contest and event organizers READ THIS

Forums will be down for scheduled maintenance Saturday, around 5am PDT or Saturday around 8:00pm PDT or both.