Site Maintenance Sunday 12/7

[Chaos he/him]

All right guys. Server maintenance is going to occur Sunday. Why? We are going to move to a spectacular new host and server. It's about dang time for that, I think.

What will happen Sunday is the big transfer of data from this server to the new server. It's a fun and exciting 10 or so gigs of information to move over, so I'm not sure how long it will take. The way I'm doing it will be such that you can still use the site in its entirety as this transfer is happening, and I'll just move the databases at the end. So while the transfer is occurring, everything should be fine, and then the downtime should be fifteen or so minutes to move the databases over, and then we'll flip the switch and it should be on the new server almost instantly.

Though nothing inherent to the transfer should prevent you from posting, I imagine the server will slow down. That could happen, among other less savory things. But really, that part should be just fine.

The database transfer requires me to turn off posting abilities (we wouldn't want to make a post and then it have disappeared on the new server) for a time, but again it should be a short time. In the history of our downtimes, this should be one of our shortest. In theory! As soon as you don't see the "this board is offline" message, you'll be on the new server!

And after it's done, guys. Guys. I've never claimed to be good system admin, but I'm much better now, and the host and everything should make this new server basically perfect. It's also infinitely scalable, so expanding server power shall be trivially easy, in theory.

Get excited

itshappening.gif

Also, in the coming few months--for real soon, not that fake, nebulous "soon"--there will be bigger changes than just back end stuff

[Mailliw73 he/him]

Do we get a preview of what these new, big changes are?

And, I'm excited! This sounds like it'll be great!

[Chaos he/him]

You will get a preview eventually!

[Chaos he/him]

Update: the new server, to my knowledge, seems ready to go, so I will be starting the Grand Transfer late tonight.

[Chaos he/him]

The Great Transfer will begin within the half hour. Everything should be fine in this process, but if not, doesn't, well this is why!

[Chaos he/him]

Test post

[Chaos he/him]

Okay, as of right this moment, the new server loads for me, and everything is glorious. You may have gotten error messages, but hopefully it didn't keep you too long.

Bed time for me, holy crap.

[Lightsworn Panda he/him]

So, uh, we got a new suborum called the "Reckoner's RPG". Yay! About time we Oregon writers got a subforum!

 

Strangely, however, the new subforum doesn't appear on mobiles.

[Chaos he/him]

Lightsworn Panda, on 07 Dec 2014 - 12:46 PM, said:

So, uh, we got a new suborum called the "Reckoner's RPG". Yay! About time we Oregon writers got a subforum!

Strangely, however, the new subforum doesn't appear on mobiles.

I see it on the mobile site. Just tap on Role-Playing and it's in that subforum list.

[mail-mi he/him]

So, ever since the server change, I haven't been able to access the 17th shard on wi-fi. It works with 3G on my mobile, but not on my wi-fi. Anything up?

[Mailliw73 he/him]

Some people in the current Elimination game have also expressed problems with accessing it on their laptops.

[Chaos he/him]

The DNS should all be propagated by now. For windows computers you may want to try in the command prompt the command "ipconfig /flushdns". In theory it should not have taken so long for the DNS to roll through. If that doesn't work and it doesn't work in like two days then something very weird is occurring, but I suspect maybe some DNS caching maybe?

[mail-mi he/him]

The DNS should all be propagated by now. For windows computers you may want to try in the command prompt the command "ipconfig /flushdns". In theory it should not have taken so long for the DNS to roll through. If that doesn't work and it doesn't work in like two days then something very weird is occurring, but I suspect maybe some DNS caching maybe?

Um...I'm a programming Drab, so where would I put that command?

[Renegade he/him]

Hmm... I have the same issue, and I tried the command in the command prompt.  It said that it was successful, but I'm still having issues connecting with the site.  I can connect the first time I use the internet when I log off and log back on, but for the most part, it doesn't work.

[Chaos he/him]

Hmm... I have the same issue, and I tried the command in the command prompt. It said that it was successful, but I'm still having issues connecting with the site. I can connect the first time I use the internet when I log off and log back on, but for the most part, it doesn't work.

What the crap? That is... Very strange.

[firstRainbowRose she/her]

Um...I'm a programming Drab, so where would I put that command?

 

Open the start menu, and in the search bar type "command prompt". That will pull up a weird looking (usually black and white, or black and green) dOS looking window. Simply type the command and hit enter.

[mail-mi he/him]

Thanks!

[mail-mi he/him]

It didn't work.

[Chaos he/him]

I really don't understand why it would not be loading on your wifi...

[Chaos he/him]

Okay. I have a plan for those of you who can't access it. Type in the command prompt "ping www.17thshard.com" and tell me what IP address it spits out. For more information on how to do that, see: http://www.wikihow.com/Ping-an-IP-Address

[Chaos he/him]

I believe I have uncovered the cause of this not working on some desktop clients. Stay tuned.

[Renegade he/him]

It didn't return anything at all when I tried pinging it.  As reference, I checked a few other websites, and they all worked just fine.

[Chaos he/him]

It didn't return anything at all when I tried pinging it.  As reference, I checked a few other websites, and they all worked just fine.

Hmmm, I think there are two unrelated errors going on. If you cannot load the site, please tell me the browser error that you get. I think yours might be DNS related...

[Renegade he/him]

Alright, here's what it says:

 

404 Not Found

 

The server cannot find the requested page:

 

www.17thshard.com/forum/ (port 80)

 

Please forward this error screen to www.17thshard.com's WebMaster.

 

Apache/2.2.29 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.29 OpenSSL/1.0.1e-fips mod_bwlimited/1.4 Server at www.17thshard.com Port 80

[Chaos he/him]

Interesting, and that didn't ping anything? Very interesting. Which browser?

I believe this to be related to IPv6 compatibility issues which I will resolve very soon. Anyone else please also let me know if you get this error. In addition please use that ping command, as that will be very helpful.

Hopefully it will be resolved tonight!