Moving servers ...

[whole diary]

[PhilWakely]

Very appropriate weather for advertising a trip to Butlins 

[Bmblbzzz]

I'm not sure exactly what's changed but understand it is for the long-term good of the forum. Thank you!

[TonyK]

Update ... utf8 v utf8mb4 ... I need to experiment in a way that will break things and need me to restore tables from backup - will require a forum outage so I will look to that overnight (and may not be tonight as I have day stuff to do and need sleep)

Shouldn't that be WTF? 

[grahame]

I'm not sure exactly what's changed but understand it is for the long-term good of the forum. Thank you!

My pleasure.  And it is actually pleasurable doing this sort of thing. 

Backup scheme (in case things go very wrong) and security (to avoid things going wrong) both in place, with some automated and a great deal (over the last 48 hours) manual monitoring.  Again, you should see virtually nothing - the only thing will be the occasional pause as your load a page because the server has paused to allow a clean backup copy of integrity to be taken.  Pauses may be as the text of a page loading, or a delay in the images on a page coming up.

[Western Pathfinder]

I notice that ,there is now a large space on the right side of the home page, arrived at the same time as introduction of the covid advise on the top banner.

[grahame]

I notice that ,there is now a large space on the right side of the home page, arrived at the same time as introduction of the covid advise on the top banner.

Oh dear ... what browser are you using?   Can you email me / message me attach an example please?

[stuving]

When I fired up my browser (Firefox) this morning at about 10:00, I got one of Mozilla's heavy warnings about dangerous sites. It was suggesting the site (stored URL: http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?action=unread) didn't match the certificate (for www.sewweb.info.uk). Ignoring the warning produced one of your detailed "why you've got a 404" pages.

Using the link given in that page to http://www.passenger.chat did work, initially saying I wasn't logged on and then handing on to www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop where I still was logged on. But access was very, very, slow, and remained slow until about half an hour ago when it recovered to normal.

That stored link does now work, as does www.sewweb.info itself, though some links to that give the warning. I wonder if Firefox may be a bit miffed by none of these being https, which is something it does fret about.

[grahame]

When I fired up my browser (Firefox) this morning at about 10:00, I got one of Mozilla's heavy warnings about dangerous sites. It was suggesting the site (stored URL: http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?action=unread) didn't match the certificate (for www.sewweb.info.uk). Ignoring the warning produced one of your detailed "why you've got a 404" pages.

Using the link given in that page to http://www.passenger.chat did work, initially saying I wasn't logged on and then handing on to www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop where I still was logged on. But access was very, very, slow, and remained slow until about half an hour ago when it recovered to normal.

That stored link does now work, as does www.sewweb.info itself, though some links to that give the warning. I wonder if Firefox may be a bit miffed by none of these being https, which is something it does fret about.

1. We are headed for https in the future, and furthermore because we've been moving domains and IP addresses around, there are some "are you sure" things going on, and perhaps some suggestions that the machine serving you may not be the right one (suggestion of someone putting in an extra spoof machine in to capture real traffic).   Since most of what we provide / serve is public data anyway - no credit card sign ups or anything like that, many of the warnings are about things you probably don't need to be warned about.

2. From 08:48 this morning, our server was under attack from activities that look like a "denial of service" attack, with traffic levels from just one remote host an order of magnitude greater than normal traffic levels for all of our visitors combined. It's not the first time I've seen something like this, though it is the first time on this server.  I will write / update regular members at http://www.passenger.chat/24016 .

[Reginald25]

Explains why I found it very slow (to the point of giving up) this am.

[Western Pathfinder]

I notice that ,there is now a large space on the right side of the home page, arrived at the same time as introduction of the covid advise on the top banner.

Oh dear ... what browser are you using?   Can you email me / message me attach an example please?

This is a problem when viewing the forum on my iPad empty space on the right side of the page looks like it should be an advertisement slot !
If you were to draw a line down from the letter S in Cheltenham Spa everything to the right below is empty.

[johnneyw]

Similar on my tablet. Much larger margin on the right hand side than the left.  The right hand margin corresponds to the width of the "New Server" railway totem on the top right hand side of the page. It's still all easy enough to read though.

[grahame]

The right hand margin corresponds to the width of the "New Server" railway totem on the top right hand side of the page.

That may be the vital clue (or a red herring) 

[grahame]

That may be the vital clue (or a red herring) 

OK ... I have found a device here where I can reproduce the problem ... and it's a nightmare of style sheets and tables. For the moment, I have changed the styling slightly to draw borders on tables, and I have changed the image into text to alleviate the issue while I work on it.

[grahame]

2. From 08:48 this morning, our server was under attack from activities that look like a "denial of service" attack, with traffic levels from just one remote host an order of magnitude greater than normal traffic levels for all of our visitors combined. It's not the first time I've seen something like this, though it is the first time on this server.  I will write / update regular members at http://www.passenger.chat/24016 .

Explains why I found it very slow (to the point of giving up) this am.

The morning after ... looking at the size of the log file since we moved servers.  Yesterday's spike is all the more dramatic when you consider that the extra was over quite a short period.



Low figure at the start of the graph is because we switched over across two nights from the older server; looking at "early doors" for today,  I am hopeful we will be back to a web server log in the 25Mb to 35Mb range

[bradshaw]

My iPad works fine unless you have the bookmarks column open, then you get the right hand columns appearing