Problem with message board.............

[marie_eve]

Is everyone having problems getting the UOAA website to come up. I had been noticing lately that I can't get the site to work a lot of times. Last night I was getting an error message and it's happened again today.

Marie

[texasgal]

Yes me tooo I just was able to log on....What in the world is going on here? Bob,we know you are busy,trying to fix the problem,but what is happening? Thanks Marie I thought I was the only one...Ginger

[EBGel]

Yes, last week a few times the site would not open. Also, even though I am a registered user and have asked to be remembered as such, often it does not log me in as a member and I have to reregister.

[BILL]

THABKS FOR THE POST..I THOUGHT MY COMPANY BLOCKED THIS TOO...CAN'T EVEN GOOGLE

[Maryel]

Yes -- I was so frustrated as I read posts on this site every day! And google couldn't open it either, so it must be the UOAA site having the problems. I was ready to toss my computer! Glad I got back in today....

[lucy'smom]

GOLLY MISS MOLLY, I had withdrawal symptoms!

[Steve S]

Yes, we were down a couple of times. I was lost for a while myself.....

[LeeAnn]

for those who are having troubles, when the site is down........ please DO NOT re-register. When you log on and put in your password, check the 'remember me' button and it should do so the next time you log in. If that does not work, then check your browser and make sure that it is set to remember passwords. This should be a solution to that problem

As far as the board being down, we have noted it and Bob the Webtech is working on it. We are also adjusting our services with the company that hosts this site. So, bare with us, we will get this worked out and should have smooth sailing as soon as the 'kinks' are worked out.

to curb the withdrawal symptoms, try some lifesaver mints. They are what gets me through the times when I cannot log on.

LeeAnn

[RedWingsFan]

Glad you guys cleared this up. I almost put my foot up my hard drive..................

[majormom2u]

About time!... I didn't know what to do with my day!...




Don't know why... but suddenly my head hurts!....

[Bob Webtech]

To all,

I've just discovered this thread, so ought to provide some explanation of the two outages that occurred between the evening of Jan 19 and mid-day Jan 20 (This thread was started about 18 minutes after the end of the 2nd outage).

Both outages were related to a server upgrade performed by our hosting company, as LeeAnn hinted above. We'd requested this upgrade about 2 weeks ago. Our new, upgraded server came online Monday evening, Jan 19, at about 8:30 pm CST (I'm giving times in US Central time because that's where I'm located). Unfortunately, somebody at the hosting company neglected to configure one of the settings correctly. This broke the discussion board, although the rest of the UOAA website was still working. I sent an urgent request to the hosting company to fix it. Meanwhile, I eventually figured out how the server configuration had changed. And at about 2:20 am Tuesday morning (CST), I succeeded in changing some file permissions in a way that got the board working again. This (first) outage had lasted nearly 6 hours.

With these changes, the board remained functional for nearly 7 hours. However, at about 9:10 am CST, somebody from the hosting company corrected the configuration setting they'd set wrong the previous evening. And, given the way I'd changed file permissions, this broke the board again. I wasn't online at this time (I'd been up late the previous night; then, I spent some hours watching the Inauguration). When I came online, I quickly saw what had happened. I got the board working again at about 1:42 pm CST. This second outage had lasted about four and a half hours.

The server upgrade has been completed, and the site is running correctly now. I don't expect any more outages like the two that occurred on Jan 19-20.

EBGel mentioned some earlier outages last week. It's true that we had quite a few short outages (often around half an hour) during the past few weeks. Those earlier incidents were very different than the two latest ones. In the two outages I just described that happened on Jan 19-20, the discussion board was down (displaying error messages) although the rest of the UOAA site remained accessible. In the earlier incidents during the past few weeks, the entire UOAA site was inaccessible--because the server that hosted our site actually crashed, requiring the hosting company to reboot that server. In fact, those frequent crashes were among the reasons we requested the server upgrade (although the more important reason involved errors due to exceeding memory limits). The upgrade involved physically moving our site to a different server, which means that it's no longer on the server that was crashing.

I must echo LeeAnn's point above that people should not re-register just because they have some difficulty logging in. Please see my post Problems logging in to new board which is also currently linked from a note displayed in red at the top of board screens. We try to avoid multiple accounts from the same person.
EBGel: If you've actually created multiple User ID's due to your difficulties logging in, please contact me by PM or e-mail and tell me the usernames of all your accounts; then, I'll merge them into a single account for you.

[marie_eve]

Bob,

Thanks so much for explaining what happened. Many of us are addicted to the board. I know you work hard trying to keep it running smoothly and I certainly appreciate it and know everyone else does too.

Marie

[lucy'smom]

Thanks Bob for all the hard work you do and the detailed explanation...you are a very dedicated web master.

flo

[SueSueUSA]

I often wondered what would happen if we all had to go into Web Withdrawals too long........I would be miserable and looking for things to do with myself, probably would involve "Retail Therapy"...

Thanks Bob for keeping is on track. You're the best!

[Maryel]

Yes -- thanks Bob for all you do to keep things running smoothly! We do appreciate your hard work, Maryel