As I’m sure many of you noticed, our forum was down for a couple of days. This was certainly not intentional nor planned, but serves as a good warning as to what can happen when you use beta software.
Here’s a summary of what happened:
It started out as some simple forum maintenance and then quickly spiraled out of control. Some of the underlying dependencies of our forum software changed and we started updating things which kept cascading. At one point one of the updates went bad and we lost network connectivity to our VM (virtual machine). Since the VM is in “the cloud” we couldn’t walk over to the machine and connect a monitor to fix it. At this point the VM was essentially dead to us. We couldn’t access it by any means.
Unfortunately the latest backup we had was around early August, so we lost some posts and some user registrations. So if you registered after August 2nd you’ll likely need to create a new account.
We’re still working to get attachments and images working correctly. Hopefully these will be corrected in the next couple of days.
Again, this was not intentional, it just started out as a forum upgrade as we like to keep on top of things.
The good news is that we’re now on an Production release so it’s no longer beta software! Hopefully it will be more stable upgrading moving forward…and if not we’ve put in place some new upgrade practices that will prevent this from happening again.
It’s also important to note that this outage had no impact on purchases or product registrations.
Sorry for the disruption! Back to our normally scheduled discussions!
Jared & Ken