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

[TheCotMan]

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

This Saturday, starting at around noon, I'll be performing scheduled maintenance on the forums and pics. This may take a while, and both may be up and down over a 3 to 4 hour period from Noon to 4pm pacific time.

Some prep work is needed for tomorrow maintenance. At 10:30pm, both forums and pics will be down for maintenance.

I hope to finish this first test, in about 15 to 30 minutes.

[TheCotMan]

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

This Saturday, starting at around noon, I'll be performing scheduled maintenance on the forums and pics. This may take a while, and both may be up and down over a 3 to 4 hour period from Noon to 4pm pacific time.

[Dark Tangent]

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

Anyone notice any difference with the forums or the site?

L3d and I made some changes to the network a few days ago, everything should be dialed in now. Does it seem faster / slower? We should have gone from 3MB/sec to about 10. (2 bonded T1 frame circuits to a 50down/10up business cable connection)

[TheCotMan]

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

DCG 815, and DCG816 added to the forums.

All US DCG published here are now synchronized on the forums in the Defcon Groups forum container.

[Dark Tangent]

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

Network upgrade / migration is going to start today.

This means some DNS problems for the next couple days, email interruptions, etc.

I'm going to start making the major switches now, expect strangeness!

21:00 PST - Time for a food break, more changes later. Please report any performance issues, things are still being tweaked, MTU sizes checked, etc.

[TheCotMan]

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

Email from forums is broken for now...

The forums cannot contact the smtp relay that it uses to send out email, so email from forums is broken, for now.

This means password reset, and new account creation won't work, and any email notified on PM receipt and updates to threads you've subscribed to won't get emailed to you either.

For now, if you have to do either, please email: defconforums@gmail.com

We can manually do what is required there until the forums can email again.

Thanks to the user that just reported this. :-)

[TheCotMan]

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

We've never had a contest with lots of traffic canceled after the forum was created, so I don't know what the best method is for dealing with this.

Initially, the idea of dumping all the threads into "New Ideas" and then closing the forum that contained them made sense, but then that would make it difficult to find the related threads later.

So, here is an alternative:
[forum=456](CANCELED) DefconBots Robot Contest (CANCELED)[/forum]

And this is within a new forum container:
[forum=476]DC17: CANCELED Official and Unofficial Events and Contests[/forum]

I further went on to apply strike-out to the description... Is that too much? Is the new location enough? I am looking for feedback in this thread. (Please don't respond in the PUBLIC-NOTICES: thread, so it can be limited to public notices.)

Thanks!

[TheCotMan]

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

Most of the maintenance is complete. I have a few more things to get done, like backups.

This is a test... can I still post?

Maintenance completed.

[TheCotMan]

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

If I can stay awake long enough, there will be maintenance on the forums tonight between 11:00pm and midnight pacific time.

[TheCotMan]

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

Separate from the above, there is going to be some scheduled maintenance coming up next week:

In the evening on Wednesday June 10th and Thursday morning, June 11th 2009 there may be service interruptions to access several defcon.org servers.

There will be no need to scratch pentagrams in the ground with chalk, perform ritualistic animal sacrifice and chant the bogeymen away but hey, if you really want to do those things in your own time, I won't stop you.

Thanks!

[Dark Tangent]

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

There is going to be some down time today and tomorrow.. possibly this weekend.

In preparation for the summer surge I am adding more memory to a server and updating the router IOS and firewall software as well as moving all the systems into a different rack.

The first stage is just creating backups and getting new configs ready, but just want to give everyone a heads up!

[TheCotMan]

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

Mail from forums appears to be working again. Please let us know if you see otherwise.

[TheCotMan]

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

A user has reported that mail from the forums is not coming to them.

I've verified that the forums are unable to pass mail to the Internet at this time, so password resets, and new user account requests are "stuck" until that is fixed.

[Edit: Removed manual work-around]

[Edit: added]
Just got word that they are looking at email right now to find the problem, It may be an hour or so before there is another update.

[TheCotMan]

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

arg, didn't take them... and now the issue does not present itself.

I've made not changes to the forum settings or web server settings between the time of the report and now. Please let us know if you see it again.

nope, not that i know of. Tor was disabled at the time. Comcast's network may do something upstream from me, but i have no local proxy.

They have done slick things int he past. I would more likely guess they hoarked up their DNS in some way, or were providing incorrect resolution to name lookups. That (dns issue) has happened to comcast customers.

quite a few. AdBlock, FlashBlock, and NoScript are the primary "i like my internets like they were in 1999!" plugins. Also there are TorButton and User-Agent Switcher.

Ah. But if it is not presenting the issue now, then it would seem it is unlikely that a plugin was munged during of the few firefox upgrades that have been pushed out.

if i see it again i'll disable and re-enable them one by one and try to see if i can learn anything.

Cool deal. Thanks man. Repeatability of problems really cuts down on troublshooting and diagnostics.

[Deviant Ollam]

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

I don't see that. Can you provide screen shots?

arg, didn't take them... and now the issue does not present itself.

Are you using a proxy of any sort, including a caching proxy?

nope, not that i know of. Tor was disabled at the time. Comcast's network may do something upstream from me, but i have no local proxy.

Do you have any extra plugins that don't come with the browser?

quite a few. AdBlock, FlashBlock, and NoScript are the primary "i like my internets like they were in 1999!" plugins. Also there are TorButton and User-Agent Switcher.

Can you verify that this problem appears when you don't have any plugins installed?

if i see it again i'll disable and re-enable them one by one and try to see if i can learn anything.