Welcome Back!

[twistedsymphony]

I apologize for the outage yesterday, it took me by surprise and unfortunately I was unable to do anything about it until late in the day.

We're on our new server now. Some people might still be going to the old sever but hopefully most ISP will update their domain registries soon enough that everyone can find their way back to the site.

Unfortunately, email is not yet working on the new server. I wasn't planning on moving here until I got everything working; but I decided that no email was better than no forum at all. Hopefully it will be up and running soon (if anyone is familiar with postfix I'd love to talk to you).

The new server should run faster and give us some breathing room to expand. :thumb:

In the mean time, if you notice any other quirks or things out of place please let me know and I'll get to them as soon as I can.

Thanks again for your patience through this process. :)

[vhal_x]

Woo! Good to be back :D xx

[Dr_Jengo]

Wow this forum was only down for less than a day but I missed it a lot.. This is one of the forums that I visit regularly these days..

[Platfus]

Yes, me too. I missed you a lot my beloved forum ;-)


Sent from my iPad 2 using Tapatalk HD
Pardon my English plz

[Biggav4000]

Yes i agree ,did not think i would miss it this much :1:

[goonergaz]

thanks for all the hard work :)

[Madigan]

http://i.minus.com/ixne0qP9RC0dv.gif

[comaamen86]

:thumb::banana::yahoo:

[Redmagster]

So relieved to see it back!!

I had withdrawal symptoms...

Brilliant forum :) :1: :1: :1:

Thanks :) :hug:

[Letrico]

Website loads much quicker than before!

[themidlandmaster]

I started to have withdrawal symptoms...

[Dreamcazman]

So what actually went wrong? I was waiting for a few PM's to come through and then BAM, site down. I must've been the only one who contacted you through Facebook as apparently you guys didn't know anything about it. :think:

[Letrico]

its server upgrade dreamcazman =D Took almost a day but all good now

[Dreamcazman]

its server upgrade dreamcazman =D Took almost a day but all good now
Thank f**k for that. :lol:

It's funny how in this day and age when a popular site goes off the air everyone's in dire straits. O_O

[Dr_Jengo]

Social media my friend... Our lives revolve around it...

[twistedsymphony]

So what actually went wrong? I was waiting for a few PM's to come through and then BAM, site down. I must've been the only one who contacted you through Facebook as apparently you guys didn't know anything about it. :think:

So these are the details of what actually happened
our previous host had a size limit on the database. about a month ago I noticed that the database for the forum was over the limit. Between that and the fact that the site was running slower and slower I started looking into other hosting options...

shortly after that I received an email from the host saying we were using too much of their resources so we had to upgrade or get out or they would shut us off.

After much research I decided to go with a private server (as opposed to shared hosting which is what we were on before) it's a lot more work to setup but it would be worth it.

After about a week and a half I had the new server up and running with a copy of the site to test and make sure everything was functioning properly... everything was working except outgoing emails. I was planning to move to the new server as soon as I got that working.

Monday morning around 10AM EST our previous host decided to shut off the database for the forum... my email box blew up with (literally) about 3000 emails from the forum with error messages that the forum was not running. everytime someone tried to access the forum I got an email telling me something was wrong.

It didn't take me long to determine what had happened, the only viable course of action was to move to the new server ASAP. Unfortunately the only computer authorized to log into the new server was at home and I wouldn't be able to get back home until later in the day. In the interim I disabled the forum main page and replaced it with a message explaining that the site was down, that way people at least knew what was going on. Thankfully I kept the main page on a separate database so it was unaffected.

I tried to get a head start on some of the migration tasks but attempting to do administrative tasks on my phone ended up causing more problems than it solved, the site went in and out a couple of times because of this so I just set it back and decided to wait until I had access to a real computer.

Monday Evening around 5:30PM EST As soon as I got home I went to work moving the site to the new server, this meant backing up the databases, restoring them, setting up the server to receive the collectorsedition.org domain, and then pushing a DNS update that told the internet that collectorsedition.org was now on a different IP.

the database backup and restore went smooth, but the forum wasn't coming back up on the new server... it took me a while to track down the reason (there was some corrupted cache files that needed to be refreshed), I setup the server to receive the new domain (or so I thought) then pushed the DNS update.

Monday Evening around 7:15PM EST at this point I thought I was done, I'd have no idea if the DNS update worked until my own ISP updated their records.... Unfortunately I had an error in the setup file on my server that told incoming requests for collectorsedition.org where to go. this is why some of you may have received a box asking for a username/password.

I had no idea this was happening until Dreamcazman messaged me on facebook :thankyou: I found a few public DNS Servers that I could connect to and kept trying different ones until I found one that had been updated to point to our new server. at this point I was able to figure out what I had done wrong in the settings and correct it.

and now the site is live on our new server! ... except we still don't have email :( ...but I'm working on it.

[vhal_x]

Still don't have email? I'm getting emails every time something is posted, perfectly fine (albeit some are delayed). This started back up last night (had 50-odd emails this morning) haha xx

[twistedsymphony]

Still don't have email? I'm getting emails every time something is posted, perfectly fine (albeit some are delayed). This started back up last night (had 50-odd emails this morning) haha xx

interesting... maybe the problem is on my end then.

[themidlandmaster]

ITsactually really cooler overloaded the server capacity for bandwidth!

[twistedsymphony]

ITsactually really cooler overloaded the server capacity for bandwidth!

yeah we overloaded memory, processor, and database storage. the old host said they could handle the bandwidth but we were averaging 50,000 hits a day :beach:

so far on the new server we're just barely hitting 50% resources at peek traffic so we've got a lot of breathing room. The site seems to be crazy fast now which is really nice :)

[Redmagster]

Most of your update made my brain spin but I made myself read through just to appreciate the effort you put in to keeping such a superb resource here for us addicts to get our fix of stuff to drool over, great interaction with other collecting 'junkies' and the best news!! :notworthy: :notworthy:

Seriously - it is appreciated :hug:

You shut it down just to make us appreciate it more didn't you?? :break:

:rave:

[nipperkipper]

http://i.minus.com/ixne0qP9RC0dv.gif

LOL, awesome, where do you find all these man?

[Madigan]

Forums, forums and more forums or I make them myself with adobe fireworks.

[Deubeuliou]

Is it just a placebo effect or does the site really loads faster?

:thumb:

[Dreamcazman]

I had no idea this was happening until Dreamcazman messaged me on facebook :thankyou: I found a few public DNS Servers that I could connect to and kept trying different ones until I found one that had been updated to point to our new server. at this point I was able to figure out what I had done wrong in the settings and correct it.

and now the site is live on our new server! ... except we still don't have email :( ...but I'm working on it.
It was no problem, I couldn't think of any other way to contact you guys. Thank you for all the hard work you put in to get the site back up and running ASAP. Kudos to you my friend. :notworthy:

Everyone including myself are really grateful. :thankyou:

btw, my emails are coming through, albeit I only get emails when someone sends me a PM. Some were delayed, others I got immediately, strange. :shrug:

[twistedsymphony]

I got email sorted out last night finally... according to the log all emails are getting sent out properly now.

I did notice that a lot of emails I received hit my spam folder, so would recommend white-listing the form email account.

I'm going to see if there is anything else I can do to "prove" we're not a spam address to the other email servers.

Is it just a placebo effect or does the site really loads faster?

:thumb:

No placebo effect. on the old server pages took between 3 and 4 seconds to render, on the new server its about half a second. Of course it could be longer depending on your connection and how far away from the server you are, but that's the time increase on the server side.

[ingmar1988]

If i type in url directly i cant get on ce.org, if i search it via google, site loads up fine...so weird.

[joynulk]

i get that too ingmar

tyme in www.colle...... ooopps sorry

search it then click it and i can get here.

[twistedsymphony]

If i type in url directly i cant get on ce.org, if i search it via google, site loads up fine...so weird.

i get that too ingmar

tyme in www.colle...... ooopps sorry

search it then click it and i can get here.

it should work now.

collectorsedition.org doesn't use the "www." (we never have, I always felt www is a wwwaste of time :P )

however I forgot to setup the www. sub-domain to forward to the non-www version.


Also, if anyone is having problems with the forum emails hitting your spam filter, you can fix it by adding admin@collectorsedition.org to your contact list...
not only will that ensure that you always get the emails, but it will send a signal to your ISP that it's a valid address so others in the future wont get it marked as spam.

[vhal_x]

Pound signs (GBP) no longer work, and are being changed into question marks once you post, just thought I'd point it out xx

[twistedsymphony]

Pound signs (GBP) no longer work, and are being changed into question marks once you post, just thought I'd point it out xx

???????

[vhal_x]

Lol, what I mean is if I am writing that something cost me 200 GBP, but use the currency sign (so the UK equivalent of a $) once you press "Post Reply" something makes it change from being the pound sign, into a question mark.

So ?200 ends up... well, looking like that.

[twistedsymphony]

no no, that was my attempt at posting a string of pound signs... :lol:

I'll look into fixing that ;) thanks

[vhal_x]

:haha: Whoops :P

No problem :D xx

[Raven]

????

? or ₤

muhahahaha

but yeah normal one doesn't want to work

[Ayiu]

the Euro sign does also not work :(

[twistedsymphony]

I would suspect that most special characters will not work until it's fixed.

[themidlandmaster]

Aus dollars are still here
:)

[Dreamcazman]

Aus dollars are still here
:)
As are the US dollars. :v: