Weekend problems?

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peteroldracer
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Weekend problems?

Postby peteroldracer » Mon Jul 24, 2017 2:15 pm

It seems that at least some users (incuding me) could not get in to A.com yesterday? It would maybe be nice if "the management" said what had happened?
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costakid
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Re: Weekend problems?

Postby costakid » Mon Jul 24, 2017 2:42 pm

I mentioned this in a post re Ryanair this morning. I was off all day yesterday.

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Re: Weekend problems?

Postby Paulinmalaga » Mon Jul 24, 2017 4:49 pm

I tried once on Saturday afternoon and again once on Sunday and the site was offline for me also. The site isn't secure anyway as Enrique has pointed out many times so wouldn't surprise me if it was hacked! Yes agree it would have been nice if ADMIN had taken the time to explain the problem whatever it may be. Even putting a "SITE OFFLINE FOR MAINTENANCE" Notice would have been something.....but no information before during or after is a poor show
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peteroldracer
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Re: Weekend problems?

Postby peteroldracer » Mon Jul 24, 2017 4:54 pm

When the cat's away...the mice go to sleep!
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costakid
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Re: Weekend problems?

Postby costakid » Mon Jul 24, 2017 5:40 pm

Admin are soon on your case if you post something that they don’t like.

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Re: Weekend problems?

Postby El Cid » Mon Jul 24, 2017 7:29 pm

Do not confuse Admin with the moderators. The site owners rarely get involved and do not enough employ staff to do so.

If you have site problems do not expect the moderators to sort that out. PM or email Admin direct.

Sid

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costakid
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Re: Weekend problems?

Postby costakid » Mon Jul 24, 2017 10:17 pm

El Cid wrote: If you have site problems do not expect the moderators to sort that out. PM or email Admin direct.

Sid
How would you do that if you can’t log in? The site was completely down on Sunday.

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Re: Weekend problems?

Postby Paulinmalaga » Mon Jul 24, 2017 10:26 pm

And here we are and yet still not a peep or hint of explanation from Admin or whoever looks after the hosting/running of the Site.
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Re: Weekend problems?

Postby El Cid » Mon Jul 24, 2017 10:34 pm

You now have access so I suggest you contact Admin by PM. Their username is andalucia.

Sid

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Re: Weekend problems?

Postby Paulinmalaga » Wed Jul 26, 2017 10:10 am

Still NO Statement from Admin on what the issues were over the weekend.....anyone any the wiser?
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Re: Weekend problems?

Postby El Cid » Wed Jul 26, 2017 10:21 am

Why is it so important for you to know the reason? It's not like you lost your mail server.

Sid

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Re: Weekend problems?

Postby Paulinmalaga » Wed Jul 26, 2017 12:14 pm

Why is there a reason we should not be informed? Seems very odd that no statement has been forthcoming as when the site last had updates and changes everyone knew the situation and was kept informed ADMIN set up a Thread specifically for the upgrade. With absolutely no communication from ADMIN on this occasion one has to wonder whether the site was "hacked" and if so was Members personal Data compromised? I feel its a fair question to be asking.
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Re: Weekend problems?

Postby El Cid » Wed Jul 26, 2017 1:10 pm

As I said, you can PM admin if it concerns you so much. Personally, I have absolutely no personal data on this site and I doubt that many members do.

I have no idea what the problem and you are just as capable of me of finding out.

Sid

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Re: Weekend problems?

Postby Paulinmalaga » Wed Jul 26, 2017 1:21 pm

Well are you telling me that as a Moderator the site doesn't have your Name...location....email and quite probably your telephone number?? I am pretty sure the site MUST have names and email addresses of every single member and in many cases phone numbers and locations and in 1 or 2 instances actual personal phots on avatars....to me that is personal DATA whatever way you look at it.
ADMIN as you may be aware from recents posts in various threads don't have a stellar track record of replying to pm's or Emails......However I did take your advice of 2 days ago in this thread " I suggest you contact Admin by PM. Their username is andalucia". And Guess What.......Zero response so far after 2 days!!!
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Re: Weekend problems?

Postby El Cid » Wed Jul 26, 2017 1:48 pm

Moderators have no access to any of your personal data, apart from the IP address that you use for your posts. If you choose to use a real name, photo and personal email address that's up to you. People who email you (assuming you have activated that option) do not have access to your email address.

If you feel that this forum does not offer you the privacy and security that you need - you have a simple choice.

Sid

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Re: Weekend problems?

Postby Paulinmalaga » Wed Jul 26, 2017 2:01 pm

I did not say Moderators had access to the data in my post but I shall leave it there.
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costakid
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Re: Weekend problems?

Postby costakid » Wed Jul 26, 2017 3:21 pm

El Cid wrote:Moderators have no access to any of your personal data, apart from the IP address that you use for your posts. If you choose to use a real name, photo and personal email address that's up to you. People who email you (assuming you have activated that option) do not have access to your email address.

If you feel that this forum does not offer you the privacy and security that you need - you have a simple choice.

Sid
I take it you mean if you don’t like it you can go somewhere else. What sort of attitude is that. You really are quite rude sid when someone doesn’t agree with you.

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andalucia
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Re: Weekend problems?

Postby andalucia » Wed Jul 26, 2017 3:51 pm

Dear Forum members,

Thanks El Cid for emailing us today to alert us to the thread asking for information about the outage at the weekend. The following is slightly technical but here goes.

The forum (and the main website) went down on Saturday afternoon. We called emergency weekend technical support at 18.10 hrs at the UK data centre where the server is located. At first they thought it was a DNS (domain name system) issue they were having in the data centre but that turned out to be unrelated.

They discovered from the logs that the server had gone into ‘read only’ mode and that was why the websites were not working. The raid hard disks had failed. At 19.57 hrs we decided to rebuild rather than repair and kicked off a bare metal restore from the previous night’s backup onto brand new Virtual Machine located on new state of the art infrastructure wing in the data centre cloud. The original server was beyond recovery.

Unfortunately this mean any posts made after the 05.00 hrs overnight Fri/Sat backup were lost.

The restore ran overnight Saturday and by 11.07 hrs Sunday we heard that it had been successful. Further work now centred around addressing issues with the kernel.

To answer @paulinmalaga we consciously decided not complicated matters, divert resources, and contaminate users caches by temporally modifying the DNS (domain name system) record to point at another server with another IP (internet protocol) address. A different nature of failure could have made this possible. In essence there was no server left to put a message on. We also considered a twitter post but believe not too many forum members follow andalucia.com on twitter.

By 15.22 hrs the work was completed and the brand new server was up and running. Obviously the server had a new IP address There was a one hour TTL (time to live) on the DNS so it took an hour or two for new IP to propagate to members computers.

We had a post incident conf call with the data centre manages on Monday evening. There was no evidence that the cause was a hack or that any personal data was compromised. The raid hard disk ‘was completely trashed’ (technical phrase used by data centre) and unfortunately no cause could be established. We assume a hardware failure.

The forum is registered with the Agencia Española de Proteccion de Datos in accordance with the Ley Orgánica de Protección de Datos (LOPD). The only personal data the forum holds above that displayed publicly on the forum (user name, registration date, location, interests) is the registration IP address and email address. The moderators do not have access to this email address.

To be honest we think the technical support did very well to respond and recover so quickly over the weekend and it was all pretty good, especially considering this is a free forum. Apologies again for not reporting this sooner.

regards,

Forum Admin

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gerryh
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Re: Weekend problems?

Postby gerryh » Wed Jul 26, 2017 4:07 pm

Thanks for the explanation.
My guess was that you had had a major server problem which took some time to recover from particularly as it was over a weekend.
Access to the forum is usually very reliable particularly as it is free to use for us forum members. :thumbup:
Cheers
Gerry
Gerry Harris

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Re: Weekend problems?

Postby El Cid » Wed Jul 26, 2017 4:29 pm

costakid wrote: I take it you mean if you don’t like it you can go somewhere else. .
Exactly. It's a free forum. You are not obliged to join and you are not obliged to stay. Like many choices in life, if you end up choosing something that doesn't suit you, for whatever reason, you are free to make another choice.

If you think that stating the obvious is being rude, then that's your opinion - yet another choice you have in this life.

Sid


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