Site was down, isn't now

[roddy]

Site was down for three hours or so, problem with the hosting company. Should all be back now. 

[Shelley]

It was also very slow yesterday, was that the same problem? or was it me?

We did have a big Virgin/Sky outage in the south yesterday, didn't affect me directly, but maybe indirectly?

[889]

It's probably that DDG bot churning through the site and overloading the server.

 

[mungouk]

I've been getting the error screen from Cloudflare on and off for the last couple of days, connecting from the UK (no VPN)...

 

Just had it again 5 mins ago — 13:05 GMT.

 

[Dawei3]

14 hours ago, mungouk said:

(no VPN)...

A friend in Kunming just said VPNs in China had been disabled starting 1 March.  I'm not sure how she would know this for all of China.  She said it was due to a new law.  I'm curious whether others are experiencing this?  Mungouk - Did your VPN start working again?

[mungouk]

@Dawei3 I'm not in China, I'm in the UK.

[mungouk]

Just in case nobody spotted it... from about 10.30am GMT+1 today I was getting "500" internal server errors and then after that the Cloudflare error screen. It was several hours before I could access the site again.

 

[Shelley]

I did,  couldn't access the site for a few hours this morning, all ok now.

I got the Cloudflare error screen everytime I tried.

[mungouk]

Must've been another one of those holes in the space-time continuum...

 

[roddy]

Yeah, I did have a notice up about it for a couple of hours afterwards, but could have been missed. I think we're just getting a bit too busy for current resources, but I'm currently wobbling between doing that on the current host (which isn't amazing and on the pricey side) and shifting to a digitalocean droplet or similar - which would be a bit of a learning curve for me, but better long run. 

[roddy]

And... we're back?

[roddy]

Right, we had about 50 hours of being offline there, possibly the longest in 17 years? Server got choked up (basically, it got full), I thought I was going to have to shift to a back-up server, had the domain redirected (which takes time to propagate) and database back-up in place (we'd have lost 24 hours of content, so annoying rather than catastrophic). Then server came back up but software wasn't working, so shifted domain back again (again, takes time), back and forth with software support, escalated, might have to wait, managed to figure out what the problem was (corrupt cache file in a folder I didn't realise had them) and.. back!

 

Let me know if you see anything glitchy. Currently I know the front page is missing, hopefully sort that out soonish [sorted]. But have work and lunch to do. 

 

Anything emailed to admin@chinese-forums.com over the weekend may or may not have gone missing - I'm not sure. Maybe nobody emailed me. 

 

 

Need to ponder hosting options a bit. The current one is sold as fully managed, but... well. And I could do with being a bit more savvy on server admin. Anyway, that's for another topic. We should, now, be strong and stable. I'll be keeping a close eye on things. 

[Jim]

It seems following some archive links ends up on a non-secure connection which my browser didn't like. Was looking up some older stuff about study courses for a friend and also found what seems to be missing pages. Oddly, going through my history to find which those were and as far as I can tell they now work. 

[Singe]

Didn't realise how much I've grown to like popping in here over the last few weeks of lockdown - until it was gone. Good to see it's all back up and running.

[roddy]

1 hour ago, Jim said:

It seems following some archive links ends up on a non-secure connection which my browser didn't like.

It is possible that's the after-effects of moving the domain back and forth. It can take a while for the changes to be picked up by various ISPs - you can end up with an error message on your phone and a working site on your desktop. 

 

1 hour ago, Singe said:

Good to see it's all back up and running.

It is. To be honest, it could have been up quite a bit quicker - a matter of hours - if it'd been a definite "it's all gone, start from your back up" situation. A lot of the delay was getting the original install back up, setting up a new one with the back up would have been quicker. 

 

One thing we do seem to have lost is some recent attachments - perhaps from a few days around the 28th. If you notice a post with a missing attachment send in a post report. Hopefully nothing irreplaceable. They may be in a back-up file, but if it's just a picture of someone's lunch...

[大块头]

Besides many, many awful tattoos and the occasional odd inquiry about joining the PLA, this forum has collected a lot of unique experiences during a very interesting time in Chinese history.

 

Is everything here set up for automatic collection by the Internet Archive?

[edelweis]

5 hours ago, roddy said:

if it's just a picture of someone's lunch...

But what if it's a picture of abcdefg's lunch ?

[roddy]

Then I'll see if he's still got the photos before trying to work with enormous backup files. 

[imron]

6 hours ago, 大块头 said:

and the occasional odd inquiry about joining the PLA

You can't bring that up without at least linking to it so newer members can enjoy it also.

[Singe]

Blimey, that PLA thread is a classic. Perhaps it isn't wise to admit that I also have an Irish passport. Now, that's got me thinking...