November Downtime

[John]

Sorry for all that recent downtime this past week.

In short, the server hard drive went haywire and was hanging on by a thread. So I shut everything down to minimize load on the hard drive (so it didn't crash completely) while I worked on sorting everything out.

In addition, I also had been wanting to change the virtualization software that I use for hosting and figured this was as good a time as any to do it. However, doing that did extend the downtime a bit more.

Web server wise, we should be in the clear at least for now.

[honeychile]

Thank you, John, for keeping the board running and up to date. This Thanksgiving Season, I'm giving thanks for YOU!

[Cheerio]

Thank you for continuing this site, John.

I'm still having a few issues with GC today.

Earlier this morning your server kept giving me a false "bad password/log-in name" refrain. It also kept stating I'd used all five log-in attempts when I'd only tried once. But eventually and for now, I've been properly logged-in.

In addition, I cannot access the main greekchat homepage by simply typing "greekchat.com" to Google then clicking- on. Doing so still takes me to the "Greekchat.com is Offline" page.

Because the main greekchat homepage is gone to me, i must instead type the Page Title of whatever GC Thread.i wish to see into my computer or phone to be able to participate in/read GC.

While I'm not the best at being computer savvy, I'll keep attempting other maneuvers to view/use GC and let you know of any other issues.

ETA: "Quick Post" function isn't working, had to hit regular "Post Reply" button instead.

[John]

Originally Posted by Cheerio

I'm still having a few issues with GC today.

Earlier this morning your server kept giving me a false "bad password/log-in name" refrain. It also kept stating I'd used all five log-in attempts when I'd only tried once. But eventually and for now, I've been properly logged-in.

The login attempts tracking integrates IP addresses... and when I opened GC back up IP addresses were not being passed through the system properly, which I corrected a number of hours later when I noticed it. Not sure but I'm thinking that was probably the cause.

Originally Posted by Cheerio

In addition, I cannot access the main greekchat homepage by simply typing "greekchat.com" to Google then clicking- on. Doing so still takes me to the "Greekchat.com is Offline" page.

The "GC is offline for website maintenance" page runs on a separate virtual server than GC itself. And visits are redirected to the offline server only when GC is marked offline. Right now GC is online, so I doubt you're loading that offline page from GC's server.

My guess is that this is a caching issue where web browsers save a copy of a page to be reused later. So it's probably a page that's saved/cached in your browser. Doing that helps speed things up but can cause issues like this one.

If you go to https://greekchat.com and still see the offline message now, the easiest way to try to get that page out of your browser cache is to reload it a few times quickly. That will often trigger a browser to pull the file again from the server which should then load the online version of the site.

Another option is to clear your web browser cache. Doing that is slightly different in each browser software but usually part of the History option. If you do this, be sure to only click on the option for deleting cached files & images. There are other options for clearing browser history, such as deleting cookies, but if you did that you would end up being logged out of all websites where you have your login info saved.

Aside from that, in the future this should be less of an issue as I've changed the code & configs used for preventing browsers from caching the "GC is offline" page. Those changes may prevent this issue altogether after this.

Originally Posted by Cheerio

ETA: "Quick Post" function isn't working, had to hit regular "Post Reply" button instead.

This I'm thinking was probably just a needed javascript file that hadn't yet downloaded to your browser. I'll test Quick Reply after posting this message.

[John]

Quick Reply test.

[John]

Originally Posted by Cheerio

ETA: "Quick Post" function isn't working, had to hit regular "Post Reply" button instead.

Yeah, I think it was probably just a javascript file that didn't download to your web browser yet. (This was also posted via Quick Reply.)

If you continue having this issue, try reloading the page but don't do anything with it for a bit. Give it a minute to fully download everything. On a computer you'll usually see a circle spinning in the browser tab to show that the page is still loading. When that stops then try Quick Reply again.

Please be sure to let me know if you continue having any issues with anything you mentioned.