Maintanance (Issues? Post Here)

[z929669]

The website will be taken down intermittently today (30 Oct 2018) for maintenance. The down time will be approximately 1-1.5 hours to allow time for backups and software config as well as recovery in the event of failure.

 

Please finish up any large edits and save your work by that time ^

 

The main upgrade is configuration of this website to use ssl (https)

 

Thanks

 

UPDATE: We just completed update of the website to SSL. There are a few minor kinks yet to work out, but I think they are mostly on the admin side, so shouldn't be an issue for most members. Recommend clearing all cookies and caches relating to step-project.com though if you do have any issues.

 

Please post here if you have issues.

[z929669]

op updated

[z929669]

Well, we did not end up taking the site down today after all. Available time was spent on a staging exercise to minimize downtime on the live site .... it paid off.

 

So maintenance will occur on Oct 30 sometime ... Should be less than one hour downtime though.

[z929669]

op updated

[Greg]

The editor is behaving a bit wonky in that it often displays as a blank rectangle. I had to open this topic three times before the editor finally appeared. I also noticed that if I refresh the page the edit seems to consistently display as a blank rectangle so I can't post.

[z929669]

Hmmm ... I'm not seeing anything like that. If others are having a similar experience, that sould confirm it is a server-side issue. I'm thinking it could be related to local caching. Have you tried clearing cache, forgetting this site clearing step-* cookies, or other browsers/fresh sessions?

[Greg]

It looks as if it's just Firefox having this issue, although it is somewhat improved after I logged out, removed the cookies, flushed the cache, and restarted the browser. Chrome seems to work fine so I think this indicates it's an issue on my end.

 

I saw this in the debug console, but it appears to just be analytics.

 

Blocked loading mixed active content “https://stats.step-project.com/piwik.js”

[z929669]

yeah, I still need to remove the pwik analytics stuff ... for FF, you need to clear cache (everything), then open History window, close bowser, and right click on any instance of forum.step-project.com. Then click "Forget about this site" ... and then do same for wiki*

 

Then restart your browser. This clears out any session info retained I believe. I have found it works for fixing a lot of caching issues while doing maintenance.

 

I'm still trying to figure out why we cannot access Files on the wiki (404) ... tomorrow.

[TechAngel85]

@All

 

We are experiencing some issues with the new server setup that is causing the site to automatically switch into maintenance mode. We will periodically check to see if the site is accessible until we are able to address the underlying issue. Thank you for your patients and we apologize for any inconveniences.

[Simondererste]

Thanks for your update. Hope you will find the problem soon, so you don't have to worry about it anymore.

[TechAngel85]

It was most likely the PHP. We increased some limits so hopefully that will fix it. The problems, we think, is that we've seen a rise in users to the site lately. We recently reached a new record for the number of users online at a single time (300+), which was about 100 more than our previous record.

[Shadriss]

Interesting... wonder what's caused the recent surge...

[TechAngel85]

Interesting... wonder what's caused the recent surge...

It's normal for this time of the year, plus Z had completed some SEO optimizations during the switch to the new server so the site should be a bit more visible during searches and whatnot.

[z929669]

I just noticed a few minutes ago that the site was down again in maintenance mode due to a request bottleneck (again). I have tweaked our server config again to better reflect actual site use, so the issue should be fixed moving forward.

 

We will always provide advance notice for any planned maintenance. These last 3-4 'maintenance' bouts since Nov 21 have been related to high server load and were unplanned. Again, the server is plenty beefy to handle more, so I opened up the throttle further to accommodate what the logs have revealed over the past few weeks (plus 20%).

[z929669]

Our cert auto-renewal experienced a failure, and the site was inaccessible to most during the past 6 hours or so.

 

We apologize for the inconvenience and have patched the issue.