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

[TheCotMan]

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

Forums will be going down for maintenance later this evening. Expect from 1 to 3 hours (Probably 1 hour or less than one hour) of down-time starting around 8:00pm Pacific Time.

[TheCotMan]

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

More forum maintenance April 30, 2008 @ 8:00pm Pacific time for 1 to 3 hours.

[TheCotMan]

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

Forums were down for some unscheduled maintenance starting at around 4:15pm, lasting until 6:30pm.

At around 4:15pm, the forums box froze. Neil and l3d were on-site at WorldDom HQ, and were able to reset it. When it came back, logs shows there were FS errors, and a bit of db corruption.

After some repair work to the filesystem, and db, Neil and l3d made themselves available (working extra hours) to force the next reboot after a software reboot failed to complete its cycle.

Forums are now back up. I found evidence that one post may have been lost, but I can't tell who attempted to post it yet. I'll review the extracted information later.

Pics had only minor problems, no content-loss and is back up.

Thanks for l3d and Neil for their work in helping bring the forums and pics back online.

-Cot

[TheCotMan]

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

Public Tasks, Feature (requests), Bug (reports)
https://forum.defcon.org/project.php?projectid=2

Categories were missing for bug reports. New categories were added for contests/events and "Other" for tasks.

Leaders/organizers should be able to use the new categories for contests/events. If you have other general categories as suggestions, just use the feature request item to submit a feature request.

[TheCotMan]

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

Forums were down earlier ~4:30pm-5:00pm for some scheduled, but unpublished maintenance.

Sorry about that.

There will be maintenance this weekend. When I have something more specific, I'll let you know. :-)

[TheCotMan]

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

We've had multiple reports that email from the forums still does not get delivered. Though the forum box continues to try to contact the mail relay server, it is unable to reach it the relay server.

This is the source of the occasional messages like this:

Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to mail-1.datamerica.com:25 in /includes/class_mail.php on line 604

The way the forums work with email: the forums spool up messages to be sent out to users when they register with the forums, or they wish to have their account password reset, or they are having some other issue. Any users visiting forums pages causes code on the server to be executed, and if a certain amount of time has passed since the last time message delivery was attempted, then the forums box tries to reach the relay server again. When it fails to contact it to get email relayed to users, the result is that error message.

This is a known problem and DT is looking into it.

For now, if you need account maintenance or activation, consider the signup page which includes the following text, and has included it since mid to late last year:

NOTICE: Email confirmation MAY be broken! If you get no email confirmation within 1 hour of sign-up, you can send an email request *after* you register with the forums to: defconforums@gmail.com
In your email message, include:
* Forum Username
* Forum Email address
Send your email from the email address you registered with.

All confirmations of email addresses will be done manually until email is fixed.

We will send you simple, logic questions, easy for a human to answer, but difficult for AI systems to answer. After getting correct answers, we can activate your account.

Thanks.

This is also explained in the rules section in the thread titled Registration: Where is my email message from the forums?.

Expect delays, as this process is not automated, and includes 2 simple questions for humans to figure out, but difficult for AI-bots that might try to spam. If more than 24 hours have passed since your tried, you can try contacting us again, as it is possible your message was greylisted by gmail.

[TheCotMan]

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

Inactive and unused account purge:
Accounts over 2 years old with no activity for 2 years and a zero post count have been purged.
Account with unconfirmed email addresses and inactivity for 2 weeks and zero post count have been purged.

These purges have bee completed according to the policy stated here account elimination of unused/abandoned accounts.

Most of these accounts are failed signups from spammers.

[TheCotMan]

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

2 Months before con:

[forum=26]Rides & Room Sharing[/forum] is now open.

Threads from last year will be closed.

[TheCotMan]

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

pics.defcon.org and forum.defcon.org were unavailble for a short time earlier today.

uptime shows that forum and pics have an uptime that exceeds the outage we saw earlier today, so the lack of access was likely a transient network problem.

There was no downtime and no data was lost on forum.defcon.org or pics.defcon.org but they were not available from the Internet.

[TheCotMan]

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

Forums were down today starting at around 5pm lasting until around 7pm, when service was restored. I think neil, l3d and DT were on-site when it came back, but I don't have details on the cause beyond observing that access to the main site (http://www.defcon.org/) was also lost around the same time.

The server was rebooted, and I'm finishing a check of the DB. It looks like there is no corruption in the db as a result of this.

I expect the forums will be open again some time between now and 8pm.

[TheCotMan]

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

There were 3 or 4 different places where mail was broken.
DT fixed one of these last week, which made it possible to track down the other 2 items on the server and fix them.

Mail flows again. I think I have removed all of the different places where we said mail was broken. If you find an outstanding notice reminding people that mail is broken, could you let me know by replying here or in PM?

Thanks,

The down-time today was a networking issue, but it has been resolved by DT and l3d.
The network problems may have precipitated a server freeze for the forums, as it needed to be rebooted after the other servers were unavailable too.

Thanks DT and l3d,
-Cot

(I can now spend less time reading the defcon forums mail box, and focus on other stuff.)

[TheCotMan]

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

Major maintenance this weekend including tonight, Friday.

Impacted services:
Forums.defcon.org the TestForums, pics.defcon.org

Several down-time periods lasting several hours may occur with little notice.

Friday night is historically a really low-volume time on the forums, so I will try to schedule as many of the long-period down-times tonight.

[TheCotMan]

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

fprums pics and test forums goinf down for 30 minutes to 4 hours starting at 10pm pacific time.

[TheCotMan]

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

First round of maintenance is complete. Pics and Forums are live, but testforums are still down.

[TheCotMan]

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

Maintenance on pics, forums, and test forums. Will be down for a bit.