EBTForum availability problems

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avij
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EBTForum availability problems

Post by avij »

The server hosting EBTForum may be unavailable for several hours during the next weekend due to construction work in our building. The following services are affected:
  • EuroBillTracker forum
  • EBT emails
  • entering notes via WAP
The main EuroBillTracker site is NOT affected, it's located elsewhere.

I'll try to move wap.eurobilltracker.com to another server during the next few days, so WAP might not be affected after all. The exact schedule isn't yet known, I'll let you know as soon as I know more.
Last edited by avij on Sat May 20, 2006 6:13 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by avij »

Alright..
  • Fifteen minutes from now, EBTF will be down for a moment when I move the server to a better temporary location.
  • EBTF will be unavailable for about three hours on Saturday morning.
  • There will also be a short break on Sunday when the server is moved back to its proper location.
Sorry for the downtime. As I mentioned in my previous message, EBT is unaffected, so you may enter notes freely during the entire weekend.
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Post by avij »

The construction work continues.. we'll have a short electricity break on early Wednesday morning and as a result, EBTForum and entering notes via WAP will not be possible during that time. www.eurobilltracker.com is not affected by this, so you'll be able to enter notes as usual. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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Post by avij »

EBTForum was unavailable yesterday due to some router problem at our parent company. Sorry for the downtime.

As usual, if we have problems with the servers, information will be posted to http://www.eurobilltracker.net/ during the outage.
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Post by avij »

The shorter address to EBTForum, EBTForum.com is currently unreachable due to some name server problems at the domain name registrar, Gandi. The longer address forum.eurobilltracker.eu still works.

The problem apparently started yesterday evening when Gandi's name servers went down. I would've expected them to have some redundancy in their setup..

This also affects EuroBillTracker's new .eu domain, www.eurobilltracker.eu

If you can read French, there is a topic about the situation in fr.reseaux.internet.hebergement

EDIT: The situation has been resolved, it was a DDoS attact directed against Gandi.
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Post by avij »

The server that hosts EBTForum has some problems with the hard disk that contains the operating system files. It hasn't died yet, but it's showing signs that it should be replaced. The forum database itself is stored elsewhere, so we're not going to lose forum messages even if we have to reinstall the server from scratch.

I'm building a replacement server for EBTForum, I'm just hoping that the current server won't die until the replacement server is ready..
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Post by avij »

EBTForum and the related services will be down for about one hour some time tonight when the new EBTForum server is installed.
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Post by avij »

The EBTForum server has now been upgraded.

Changes:
Some new hardware
Faulty Maxtor -> working Hitachi (hard disk)
Fedora Core 1 -> Fedora Core 5 (operating system)
Apache 2.0.51 -> Apache 2.2.0 (web server)
PHP 4.3.11 -> PHP 5.1.4 (programming language)
Perl 5.8.3 -> Perl 5.8.8 (programming language)
MySQL 3.23.58 -> MySQL 5.0.21 (database server)
qmail 1.03 + various patches -> netqmail 1.05 (mail server)
Courier-imapd -> Dovecot (IMAP mail server)
old Horde -> current Horde (webmail, currently disabled, use a regular email client until webmail is available again)
re-enable MRTG statistics and hardware monitoring
re-enable some cron jobs (eg. the script that updates my signature..)
phpBB 2.0.20 -> phpBB 2.0.21 (the actual forum software)

If you run into problems using the forum or entering notes via WAP, please let me know and I'll see what I can do. Lots of things changed, so it's likely that some minor problems might surface.
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Post by avij »

There is going to be a short hardware maintenance break for the EBTForum server in the next hour or so.
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Post by avij »

Well.. short. Everything is relative. Ars longa, vita brevis and all that.

The EBTForum server is apparently suffering from some udev related problems, this bug report was the closest I could find. I replaced some hardware from the server to see if it'd change the situation, but to no avail. If the forum is randomly unavailable during the next few days(/weeks), you know what to blame. Let's hope that the problem gets resolved soon, one way or another.
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Post by avij »

There have been some unexpected problems with the EBTForum server in the last few days. I've now replaced some hardware, I'll wait a few days to see if it helps.
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Post by avij »

The forum was unavailable on Thursday between 20:10 and 23:32 CET due to our ISP losing connectivity to FICIX for some unknown reason. You can see the gap in the FICIX traffic graph below:

(edit: the graph has become outdated and has been removed)

Unfortunately for us, our connection wasn't restored until some time after the problem had been initially fixed at the ISP. Sorry for the downtime.
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Post by avij »

Our office (where EBTForum is hosted) lost network connectivity this afternoon, and as it looked like the connection won't be restored until Monday at the earliest, I decided to transfer EBTForum to the same webserver as the main EuroBillTracker site.

It may take a while until the IP address changes have reached all of you. Sorry for the inconvenience.


p.s. wap.eurobilltracker.com has also been moved to the main EBT webserver.
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Post by avij »

The forum was hosted for about a week on its original server after my previous message in this topic. However, the server where the forum was transferred started having some hardware problems and as a result, the forum was once again moved to a different server this morning. Let me know if you run into problems.

(I certainly hope that I won't need to do this again in the next few months..)
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Post by avij »

Our office (where the forum is hosted) lost network connectivity this afternoon for some reason. The ISP has been notifed about the problem.

www.eurobilltracker.com is unaffected, only the forum is unfortunately unavailable until the ISP guys fix the connection.

EDIT: Our original network connection is still down. I switched the forum server to use a different ISP. It may take a while for the name server changes to propagate to your corner of the internet.
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