Ok, sorry about the outages, we are making some changes to improve server security.
The forum should be fully working now with the exception of existing attachments while we wait for on disk permissions to change. If attachments are not yet loading please just wait for now before reporting a fault. I will post when this is completed.
Edit: Please note that there may be gateway timeouts while this is in progress as it's quite I/O intensive.
Work has been completed 
all attachments I've tried returns a "404 - Attachment Not Found"
Still getting "404 - Attachment Not Found" when clicking links to download attachments.
Can you please give me an example?
Thanks, might be just a path issue here. Investigating
Edit: Yup, it's working fine now.
Is the fact the forum's mobile theme isn't working at present related to the work done earlier today?
All the mobile theme's CSS and image files are returning with 404 and 502 errors at present, which greatly delays the page rendering, and leaves it unusably un-styled when it does.
Thanks for the report, I will look into it
This has been fixed, rendering on mobile works fine now also.
Received the following error last few days:
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Sorry syau, you are banned from using this forum!
This ban is not set to expire.
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However I am able to enter the forum by using the Safari secure browsing in my phone
This is not a server error, the IP you're coming from must be banned. Please PM me the IP and I will have a look.
This is not a server error, the IP you're coming from must be banned. Please PM me the IP and I will have a look.
Fixed by clearing the safari cache.
This is not a server error, the IP you're coming from must be banned. Please PM me the IP and I will have a look.
Fixed by clearing the safari cache.
Doubtful, you will only get this message if you connected to the website from a banned IP, and as the website content is dynamically generated your local browser will not cache it. It's more likely your IP changed.
If it happens again please PM me your IP so we can investigate. Otherwise please note that this thread is special, do not reply here unless you actually have a server error.
Just a heads up.
Performing server maintenance and some software upgrades which may impact services. Please be patient, I will announce when the work is complete.
This has been reported countless times, we do not have a solution at this time. The current work being performed will allow us to move to a different file system that should resolve this issue.
There will be some major maintenance of servers over the next few days as we upgrade some hardware in the systems. While there should not be an outage there may be short disruptions to services while this work is performed.
Edit 2024-01-12 07:51:06 - Note that this is still ongoing work, I will update this when the work is complete
Edit 2024-02-12 08:44:33 - Still ongoing work, expect a prolonged outage again soon while we move data onto new storage medium.
Bumping this thread so people see this.
We will be making some major changes soon that will likely keep the forum down for several hours. I have asked Dave to make an announcement and schedule a time for when this is to commence. The goals here are to address several things.
1) As the forum has grown so has the hosting requirements, we are reaching I/O saturation and have decided to upgrade to faster storage medium.
2) We are still seeing attachment issues which still seem to be the fault of some rare bug in GlusterFS. As a result we are moving away from this to DRBD + GFS2
3) Even if GlusterFS was not faulting with the attachments, it's starting to get very slow and causing random stalls when dealing with large directories.
The decision to move from GlusterFS to DRBD + GFS2 has been made after several months of evaluation, however as we do not have a testing environment, we wont know how well it will work until we pull the trigger. We do expect quite a performance improvement, however it will be hard to determine if that is due to the change in the software stack, or the hardware upgrade.
Thanks Geoff.
Go time will be 11pm tinght AEST.
Feel free to touch grass for a few hours.
Thanks.
Forums are back up (obviously) however attachments are still being copied over, so expect broken attachments until they have all moved over.
Yes, there is certainly a huge performance boost here, IO load on average has dropped from 90+% to around 5-10%. DRBD + GFS2 is so much faster I can actually now count how many attachment files are on disk (for the record, over 810,000 files in one directory (SMF
), and because it's so much less disruptive now to manage this directory we can start to look at migrating this into a proper directory structure.
Note the work is still not complete though, there is still a few things to shuffle around and there may be some minor outages lasting a few minutes while the work is completed.
