If you have been paying attention to our Facebook page or reading our Twitter tweets, you will know that Brainformation Forums is scheduled to migrate to a new server over at the hosting service in the sky. This involves copying everything here to there, and since those people have done this a few times in the past all should go well. HOWEVER, since I too have done this is the past I know better and leave open the possibility of losing some content and possibly e-mail. Given that possibility (not a great likelihood, but still), I'll not be posting replies or new messages here until the migration is complete. That should not be more than a day or two. Not posting means we won't lose anything of significance. I don't want to say new posts should not be added, but be aware that they may not transfer smoothly to the new server.
Thank you for your understanding.
SPECIAL NOTE
Forum rules
Post a new topic to begin a chat.
Any topic is acceptable, and topic drift is permissible.
Post a new topic to begin a chat.
Any topic is acceptable, and topic drift is permissible.
Re: SPECIAL NOTE
Hangin' in there Yogi, hi hi!
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This is truly frustrating. I'm no expert at any of this, but I have been maintaining this forum for sixteen years. You would think that would be enough experience to get through any upgrade issues. The problem is that there is ALWAYS a problem. In a few instances I have been known to shoot myself in my own foot or overlook something obvious. Several times the upgrade isn't what it is advertised to be and/or the hosting service needs to tweak something on the server side in order to get things to work. This time they were stumped and wanted to migrate us to a new server. I didn't see any reason why that had to be done given there was nothing new on the other server which could be applied to the current upgrade problem. After a few go-rounds with other help desk folks, they concluded it was a problem with phpBB and not a server problem after all. Of course. Never in all the sixteen years I've been with them have they conceded their server was the issue.
Anyway ... the migration was called off because they came to the same conclusion I did. It would not make any difference. So now I have something posted in the phpBB tech support forums and may or may not get an answer there. It's a lot like Linux tech support. Everybody is an expert and they all have different solutions. Most of them will only solve a specific problem on a specific system, none of which relates to MY problem. Fortunately, I have three versions of this site to maintain and can afford to troubleshoot issues on one of the archive sites. That is where we are right now. I went as far as I could and am hoping the support forums will actually be enlightening this time around. In the meantime we can simply conduct business as usual in this forum. If I discover a reasonable fix then I will apply it across all the boards. If I don't come up with a reasonable fix, perhaps there is some alternate to phpBB that I would find more appealing.
Carry on. Updates will be posted as they occur.
Anyway ... the migration was called off because they came to the same conclusion I did. It would not make any difference. So now I have something posted in the phpBB tech support forums and may or may not get an answer there. It's a lot like Linux tech support. Everybody is an expert and they all have different solutions. Most of them will only solve a specific problem on a specific system, none of which relates to MY problem. Fortunately, I have three versions of this site to maintain and can afford to troubleshoot issues on one of the archive sites. That is where we are right now. I went as far as I could and am hoping the support forums will actually be enlightening this time around. In the meantime we can simply conduct business as usual in this forum. If I discover a reasonable fix then I will apply it across all the boards. If I don't come up with a reasonable fix, perhaps there is some alternate to phpBB that I would find more appealing.
Carry on. Updates will be posted as they occur.
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According to server administrators, it is ALWAYS the customers fault, hi hi.
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I've dealt with IT professionals for several years and almost to a man (or woman) they are arrogant. They never give their customers credit for knowing much about what they do. That's fine in a place like Motorola where we all work for the same boss, but when IT is your business and you think your customers are all air heads, that's going to affect your bottom line.
As it stands the phpBB support forums are a joke. Worse than any Linux forum in which I've ever begged for help. It seems that each category has at least one moderator who actually knows what is going on. The rest of the posts and inputs are from pseudo-experts who are even more arrogant than those professional IT jocks I used to work with. I'm pretty good at spelling out the exact details of the problem. Most of the time that's very helpful and I get an reasonable answer fairly quickly. There are times when I either can't supply information they understand or when I come up with a problem they never heard of. The current problem seems to fit the latter category. When the official guru tells me what is equivalent to "reboot the system" I know right away they are clueless. That's what happened on the phpBB boards.
So, now, the server people say it's the software and the software people say ... nothing much. The problem persists nonetheless so that it must be my fault. Being given the run around I decided to just go back to the old software and try a different approach. Lo and behold the old software no longer works. It has the identical problem I was seeking help for with the upgrade. That means the server admins did something to break the site. If they could do that, it implies they can fix the original problem. I explained my case in a follow up to the trouble ticket and am waiting for a response. It really sucks that there are always problems with updates, and it's not always on the server side. Even Linux developers get it right once in a while. But these phpBB jocks are on some other planet. There must be a better way to do this.
As it stands the phpBB support forums are a joke. Worse than any Linux forum in which I've ever begged for help. It seems that each category has at least one moderator who actually knows what is going on. The rest of the posts and inputs are from pseudo-experts who are even more arrogant than those professional IT jocks I used to work with. I'm pretty good at spelling out the exact details of the problem. Most of the time that's very helpful and I get an reasonable answer fairly quickly. There are times when I either can't supply information they understand or when I come up with a problem they never heard of. The current problem seems to fit the latter category. When the official guru tells me what is equivalent to "reboot the system" I know right away they are clueless. That's what happened on the phpBB boards.
So, now, the server people say it's the software and the software people say ... nothing much. The problem persists nonetheless so that it must be my fault. Being given the run around I decided to just go back to the old software and try a different approach. Lo and behold the old software no longer works. It has the identical problem I was seeking help for with the upgrade. That means the server admins did something to break the site. If they could do that, it implies they can fix the original problem. I explained my case in a follow up to the trouble ticket and am waiting for a response. It really sucks that there are always problems with updates, and it's not always on the server side. Even Linux developers get it right once in a while. But these phpBB jocks are on some other planet. There must be a better way to do this.
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Well just maybe some day soon, they will all be replaced with AI and you'll have to argue with a machine who thinks it is God and cannot make an error, hi hi.
I do know exactly what you mean though. Working on gaming machines where the software is always buggy as heck. But I had nothing to do with the software, just the physical components. And a lot of them don't make much sense to be used in some of the places they were used in. If I had a dime for every time I had to replace a small transistor with larger one that would hold up, and the ways we had to go about doing it, one would think whoever designed the darn thing would know you can't use a 2 amp limited transistor on a 5 amp circuit and expect it to hold up. There were a few games we had to go all the way to a 10 amp transistor, and build up the traces to it so the mobo wouldn't fry. This is another place we used to use 1/4 inch wide or in some cases wider sheets of copper soldered over a trace like a heat sink. And quite often we had to add large diodes to the coils so the spark they created when released wouldn't flow back to the transistors that powered them. One would think engineers would have though of all these possible problems and change their design so those problems wouldn't happen.
When I was working on pinball machines, we had a brand new one, by one of the lesser known companies that had a serious problem with arcing. Sometimes that sucker would arc so bad, you could smell the ozone in the air just walking over to the machine. Usually adding a diode would stop the problem, but not always. And you know KIDS, and how when they find a problem with a machine, they know how to aggravate the problem to make it worse, hi hi.
We had one machine the display would be burned out on every time we were called for service.
I finally met the kid who was causing it. It only happened on that one game, but every time we fixed it, he would make the display burn out again. I tried to do it myself and couldn't. I offered the kid 100 bucks to show me how he makes the display burn out. He did and it was simple. He just held the flipper button in for 30 to 45 seconds, then started tapping it as fast as he could, and poof the display would burn out. None of the transistors burned out which was odd, it was the actual display going bad. But now that I knew how he did it, I was able to fix the machine so it wouldn't do that again, those displays were like 185 bucks each at the time, so paying him 100 bucks to save 500 bucks made sense to me, although the boss was mad about it. After I fixed it this time, we never had to replace a display again, unless they just wore out.
But from this, there were a lot of new components we added to a new machine to prevent problems we've had in the past and figured out how to prevent.
I do know exactly what you mean though. Working on gaming machines where the software is always buggy as heck. But I had nothing to do with the software, just the physical components. And a lot of them don't make much sense to be used in some of the places they were used in. If I had a dime for every time I had to replace a small transistor with larger one that would hold up, and the ways we had to go about doing it, one would think whoever designed the darn thing would know you can't use a 2 amp limited transistor on a 5 amp circuit and expect it to hold up. There were a few games we had to go all the way to a 10 amp transistor, and build up the traces to it so the mobo wouldn't fry. This is another place we used to use 1/4 inch wide or in some cases wider sheets of copper soldered over a trace like a heat sink. And quite often we had to add large diodes to the coils so the spark they created when released wouldn't flow back to the transistors that powered them. One would think engineers would have though of all these possible problems and change their design so those problems wouldn't happen.
When I was working on pinball machines, we had a brand new one, by one of the lesser known companies that had a serious problem with arcing. Sometimes that sucker would arc so bad, you could smell the ozone in the air just walking over to the machine. Usually adding a diode would stop the problem, but not always. And you know KIDS, and how when they find a problem with a machine, they know how to aggravate the problem to make it worse, hi hi.
We had one machine the display would be burned out on every time we were called for service.
I finally met the kid who was causing it. It only happened on that one game, but every time we fixed it, he would make the display burn out again. I tried to do it myself and couldn't. I offered the kid 100 bucks to show me how he makes the display burn out. He did and it was simple. He just held the flipper button in for 30 to 45 seconds, then started tapping it as fast as he could, and poof the display would burn out. None of the transistors burned out which was odd, it was the actual display going bad. But now that I knew how he did it, I was able to fix the machine so it wouldn't do that again, those displays were like 185 bucks each at the time, so paying him 100 bucks to save 500 bucks made sense to me, although the boss was mad about it. After I fixed it this time, we never had to replace a display again, unless they just wore out.
But from this, there were a lot of new components we added to a new machine to prevent problems we've had in the past and figured out how to prevent.
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I've been on both sides of the software development process, i.e., developer and user. Because of that I can see things and understand how or why a developer might have chosen a specific way to accomplish a task. More often than not there was a cost related issue, and I'm sure that's what happened frequently in the pinball gaming industry. Making a machine kid proof can be very expensive.
The world gets infinitely more complicated when you are developing software for general consumption. There is no way a developer can anticipate all the possible ways their software can be abused or misused. I can forgive them for that because I've been there and on the receiving end of some irate users of my product.
Here, with the software upgrade, I am not only dealing with software developers but also system administrators who want nothing to do with the software. I can't say I blame them. However, I know something about server administration too and nothing irks me more than a front line help desk worker who is trying to make me believe they know what they are doing. I'm fairly good at detecting incompetence and wish I was equally good at fixing the problems. Unfortunately all I have to rely on is those seemingly incompetent helpers.
I've not determined yet if the phpBB upgrade is flawed. It seems not to be, other than the published known issue which I patched. The help desk team tweaked the server in their attempt to correct the problem, but in the end decided there is nothing more they can do. The software folks don't even want to talk about the issue. So, my only recourse is to revert back to the original software that was working prior to the update attempt. I did that and now that software is entirely broken. That's hard to understand because those tweaks are global in that they changed the configuration in the php software extensions. If those changes broke the website I was trying to upgrade, they should also have broken this one and the second archive site. But that did not happen. Only that one site got trashed.
Since MY backups no longer work the solution is to have the hosting service restore things from THIER backups. I tried to explain that only that one subdomain needs fixing but I'm not sure how well they got the message. If they back up the entire domain then we will lose all our data from 23 February going forward. I made a backup of the database today in anticipation of such a foobar, but certain things may still be lost if they don't do the restoration correctly. We will see how it goes.
The world gets infinitely more complicated when you are developing software for general consumption. There is no way a developer can anticipate all the possible ways their software can be abused or misused. I can forgive them for that because I've been there and on the receiving end of some irate users of my product.
Here, with the software upgrade, I am not only dealing with software developers but also system administrators who want nothing to do with the software. I can't say I blame them. However, I know something about server administration too and nothing irks me more than a front line help desk worker who is trying to make me believe they know what they are doing. I'm fairly good at detecting incompetence and wish I was equally good at fixing the problems. Unfortunately all I have to rely on is those seemingly incompetent helpers.
I've not determined yet if the phpBB upgrade is flawed. It seems not to be, other than the published known issue which I patched. The help desk team tweaked the server in their attempt to correct the problem, but in the end decided there is nothing more they can do. The software folks don't even want to talk about the issue. So, my only recourse is to revert back to the original software that was working prior to the update attempt. I did that and now that software is entirely broken. That's hard to understand because those tweaks are global in that they changed the configuration in the php software extensions. If those changes broke the website I was trying to upgrade, they should also have broken this one and the second archive site. But that did not happen. Only that one site got trashed.
Since MY backups no longer work the solution is to have the hosting service restore things from THIER backups. I tried to explain that only that one subdomain needs fixing but I'm not sure how well they got the message. If they back up the entire domain then we will lose all our data from 23 February going forward. I made a backup of the database today in anticipation of such a foobar, but certain things may still be lost if they don't do the restoration correctly. We will see how it goes.
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Although my dad wrote all the paychecks by hand himself, he still relied on an accounting firm as a double check regarding taxes and weekly reporting of FICA and other things. This was many long years ago, while were using a company with a name like G. C. Noble. They were actually great! Dad would get a report from them and it always matched what he had calculated, and then we would make the necessary deposits to the bank for all the legal stuff.
After dad had his heart attack and I had to handle it, I asked them if they would cut the checks also. The price they quoted was outlandish. I already had promotional quotes from PayChex in various advertisements they sent out. So I gave them a call.
After spending almost two hours with their rep, he gave me a quote for doing everything, working only from the punched clock time cards. They would do the math, cut the checks, make the deposits at the bank, and provide me with printed out ledger sheets that matched the way dad did things. Basically everything G. C. Noble was doing, plus a ton of extra things, all for a price of only 1/3 of what Noble was charging us for only a report, no ledgers or much of anything else.
I always checked the checks because they sent the envelopes unsealed for that reason.
On or around the eleventh time of cutting our checks for us, they made a major error. Somehow they managed to catch this error about the same time I did, and while I was calling them on the phone, they were calling me on the other line, hi hi.
The first check had no name on it, and all the checks after it were one name off, so person two was getting person one's paycheck amount, and so on down the line, and the last person on the list had no amount on their paycheck.
They reran the checks and brought them right over to me, within about 20 minutes.
I was most impressed by the fact they caught the error and notified me not to hand out the checks, a new batch was on the way.
They blamed it on a glitch on their server that has happened a couple of times in the past, but they caught it before the checks were sent out. The following week they only charged us 1/2 half their normal rate as an apology for the mistake.
Once dad was back to work, he did go ahead and stay with PayChex but still wrote them out himself, hi hi.
Albeit, he did love the ledger pages they provided, and said they were much better than Noble's.
I don't know enough about servers or php programs to even give my two cents worth on the issue.
But do agree with, programmers, and game builders, cannot possibly kid proof a game, hi hi.
One pinball maker, on a few of their games, came up with an awesome coin handling systems though.
Kids would break open the coin box door to steal the coin box. However, a few of these machines did not have a coin box behind the door, The coins rolled all the way to a box near the head of the game, a little past the middle of the cabinet.
For us to get to the coin box, we had to have this pear shaped magnet with us, and slip it into a concave holder inside the machine. This would activate a servo motor that would pull the box up to the door to empty, and when we removed the little magnet it would go back to it's resting place near the front of the machine. Any old magnet wouldn't work, it had to be that darn pear shaped thing that fit the concave holder. And it wasn't just any of those magnets either, they all had a number on them that matched a stamped number inside the machine if you knew where to look for it.
Since we only had like three machines with this system in it, we just painted the tops of the magnets to match the border color of the head box on the machine.
Don't know what they made that powerful little server motor from that pulled the heavy coin box to the front, but we never had one burn out or not work properly. That's saying a lot for a pinball machine that has tons of parts breaking all the time, hi hi.
After dad had his heart attack and I had to handle it, I asked them if they would cut the checks also. The price they quoted was outlandish. I already had promotional quotes from PayChex in various advertisements they sent out. So I gave them a call.
After spending almost two hours with their rep, he gave me a quote for doing everything, working only from the punched clock time cards. They would do the math, cut the checks, make the deposits at the bank, and provide me with printed out ledger sheets that matched the way dad did things. Basically everything G. C. Noble was doing, plus a ton of extra things, all for a price of only 1/3 of what Noble was charging us for only a report, no ledgers or much of anything else.
I always checked the checks because they sent the envelopes unsealed for that reason.
On or around the eleventh time of cutting our checks for us, they made a major error. Somehow they managed to catch this error about the same time I did, and while I was calling them on the phone, they were calling me on the other line, hi hi.
The first check had no name on it, and all the checks after it were one name off, so person two was getting person one's paycheck amount, and so on down the line, and the last person on the list had no amount on their paycheck.
They reran the checks and brought them right over to me, within about 20 minutes.
I was most impressed by the fact they caught the error and notified me not to hand out the checks, a new batch was on the way.
They blamed it on a glitch on their server that has happened a couple of times in the past, but they caught it before the checks were sent out. The following week they only charged us 1/2 half their normal rate as an apology for the mistake.
Once dad was back to work, he did go ahead and stay with PayChex but still wrote them out himself, hi hi.
Albeit, he did love the ledger pages they provided, and said they were much better than Noble's.
I don't know enough about servers or php programs to even give my two cents worth on the issue.
But do agree with, programmers, and game builders, cannot possibly kid proof a game, hi hi.
One pinball maker, on a few of their games, came up with an awesome coin handling systems though.
Kids would break open the coin box door to steal the coin box. However, a few of these machines did not have a coin box behind the door, The coins rolled all the way to a box near the head of the game, a little past the middle of the cabinet.
For us to get to the coin box, we had to have this pear shaped magnet with us, and slip it into a concave holder inside the machine. This would activate a servo motor that would pull the box up to the door to empty, and when we removed the little magnet it would go back to it's resting place near the front of the machine. Any old magnet wouldn't work, it had to be that darn pear shaped thing that fit the concave holder. And it wasn't just any of those magnets either, they all had a number on them that matched a stamped number inside the machine if you knew where to look for it.
Since we only had like three machines with this system in it, we just painted the tops of the magnets to match the border color of the head box on the machine.
Don't know what they made that powerful little server motor from that pulled the heavy coin box to the front, but we never had one burn out or not work properly. That's saying a lot for a pinball machine that has tons of parts breaking all the time, hi hi.
Re: SPECIAL NOTE
I can sympathize with your dad for wanting to write the payroll checks personally. Those checks, and the people they were issued to, are what made the business run. Nothing is worse than an employee, or many employees, who didn't get paid what they expected. It's not just losing or gaining the money, but also losing confidence in the company you work for. Now and days it's all done in the cloud. You and your accountant use the same virtual machines and can see what each other is doing. It's not to say there are no longer snafu's in the cloud accounting systems, but it's a lot easier to keep track of what other people are doing for you that way.
Yesterday I believe I made it perfectly clear what I expect from the restoration of our archived web site. They read it back to me and both of us seem to agree on what will be done. I'm not 100% confident that restoration will fix the problem, but I do want to return to a known good starting point. After that is achieved there is still the issue of upgrading the software. You and I don't agree on upgrade philosophies in some instances, but I would like to keep this place as current as possible. If we get hacked or denied the ability to operate, nothing monumental would be lost. I understand that. However, there is a lot of content here that can be found nowhere else in the world. That is worth protecting, and upgrading the software is the best protection method available. That and backups. Which reminds me. I probably should back up this site again given that they didn't restore anything yet.
Yesterday I believe I made it perfectly clear what I expect from the restoration of our archived web site. They read it back to me and both of us seem to agree on what will be done. I'm not 100% confident that restoration will fix the problem, but I do want to return to a known good starting point. After that is achieved there is still the issue of upgrading the software. You and I don't agree on upgrade philosophies in some instances, but I would like to keep this place as current as possible. If we get hacked or denied the ability to operate, nothing monumental would be lost. I understand that. However, there is a lot of content here that can be found nowhere else in the world. That is worth protecting, and upgrading the software is the best protection method available. That and backups. Which reminds me. I probably should back up this site again given that they didn't restore anything yet.
Last edited by yogi on 01 Mar 2021, 19:40, edited 1 time in total.
Re: SPECIAL NOTE
Most of our employee's started working for us in the teens, and were still with us, in some cases ten years after they should have retired. And dad like to keep pulse of everyone there too. Many of them were invited to family functions and considered close friends over the years. Smartest way I know to run a business!
I do upgrade my computers all the time. It was way back in the early Windows days that if you upgraded your computer, it usually meant buying all the newest versions of the programs you were running, or pay for upgrades on those too.
And as always, something broke. So, in the Windows days, I got into the habit of once a machine was working the way I wanted it to work, then I would never upgrade that particular machine again.
Which as you know presented some problems for me when I did eventually upgrade. Many programs could not be upgraded from one version to another, so you were still stuck buying the upgrades leading up to it. And a few of the programs I used, I just couldn't afford to do that with. I wasn't made of money, hi hi. So for me, and some of my old program data, moving to Linux was a godsend. The Linux programs could read my old data with ease, and create the new files for the latest and greatest programs.
I'm sure complex server programs, with all their add-on components by users, can come with a lot of complications.
I still don't understand why a server can be running both Linux server or Windows server, unless they are actually run on different servers at the server farm, which is probably the case.
I do upgrade my computers all the time. It was way back in the early Windows days that if you upgraded your computer, it usually meant buying all the newest versions of the programs you were running, or pay for upgrades on those too.
And as always, something broke. So, in the Windows days, I got into the habit of once a machine was working the way I wanted it to work, then I would never upgrade that particular machine again.
Which as you know presented some problems for me when I did eventually upgrade. Many programs could not be upgraded from one version to another, so you were still stuck buying the upgrades leading up to it. And a few of the programs I used, I just couldn't afford to do that with. I wasn't made of money, hi hi. So for me, and some of my old program data, moving to Linux was a godsend. The Linux programs could read my old data with ease, and create the new files for the latest and greatest programs.
I'm sure complex server programs, with all their add-on components by users, can come with a lot of complications.
I still don't understand why a server can be running both Linux server or Windows server, unless they are actually run on different servers at the server farm, which is probably the case.
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To answer your server question, think of servers as being software and not hardware. It's very easy for any one computer to run multiple instances of different software. I, for example, run Linux OS's from this Windows 7 machine. Both Windows and Linux could be configured to run server software simultaneously yet exist on the same piece of hardware. In fact that is how the cloud systems work. They are all virtual. Also, my NAS is an independent Linux sitting on the network minding it's own business. Both Linux and Windows access that NAS (server) to transfer files between the systems. It sounds complicated, but it's pretty straight forward.
The restoration of our archive site has not taken place as of this writing. I know they have the backups so that it's just a matter of the admin searching for them and restoring my website. The administrator, however, works in a different department than does the helpdesk; neither one knows what the other is doing. Plus, a few days ago one of the helpdesk gurus decided I needed a backup and ordered it from the admin. Unfortunately it was for the wrong day and they simply restored the site that was not working. Now I'm asking them to restore the correct day/site and the admin must be pissed. It's his/her job, but still it involves a little extra work digging up the right backups from the archive.
The restoration of our archive site has not taken place as of this writing. I know they have the backups so that it's just a matter of the admin searching for them and restoring my website. The administrator, however, works in a different department than does the helpdesk; neither one knows what the other is doing. Plus, a few days ago one of the helpdesk gurus decided I needed a backup and ordered it from the admin. Unfortunately it was for the wrong day and they simply restored the site that was not working. Now I'm asking them to restore the correct day/site and the admin must be pissed. It's his/her job, but still it involves a little extra work digging up the right backups from the archive.
Re: SPECIAL NOTE
We use the NAS also for file storage, but mainly of things we access often on any type of computer, including Debi's Schmartz-Fonz, hi hi.
Each VM requires a certain amount of RAM.
Yet some host providers have accounts where one website can have 100,000 people all on-line at the same time, overall they have about 4 million members to that website.
I know that can't be done on a simple server.
Each VM requires a certain amount of RAM.
Yet some host providers have accounts where one website can have 100,000 people all on-line at the same time, overall they have about 4 million members to that website.
I know that can't be done on a simple server.
Re: SPECIAL NOTE
Yesterday I got tired of waiting for the backup to occur. I knew that if and when they did the backup the problem would still exist, but then they could not point to what they considered faulty phpBB software. They tinkered with the server settings and it didn't work is the final analysis. Why they could not make it work is the subject of contention. Regardless, I updated the ticket and asked for an estimate of when they thought they could get around to doing the restoration. The answer I got back was astounding. They said it's taking longer ... wait for it ... because the server is LINUX. That makes it harder to retrieve.
Well I know bullshit when I read it but there wasn't much I could do to motivate them or convince them it was their problem and not mine. So on a whim I did a random Google search for the error message the server was serving to their error logs. Low and behold there was a solution in the phpBB support community. I posted to that community and the forum guru didn't have a clue, which is why I went back to the hosting service with my complaint. Apparently the problem we had is widespread. When the upgraded phpBB software is installed, it either turns off a critical php function or that function is not enabled by the server administrator. Flipping the switch, or adding the proper extension to php, is the fix. I copied the article and sent it to the helpdesk. 20 minutes later everything was working again, and no backup, no moving to a new server, and no tweaks were necessary.
In their final reply they encouraged me to make backups before I do any upgrade. Believe me, if it wasn't for this frickin' pandemic I'd be on an airplane on my way to their office to read them their fortune.
Anyway, I have to clean up the mess in that archive directory and attempt to upgrade the second archive site. I presume that will all go well and the final step would be to upgrade this site. There are a couple new things I think I'll be trying, and of course you will be the first to know about them. Nobody else would care. Plus, with any luck at all, the problem you have with automatic log off might be resolved.
Well I know bullshit when I read it but there wasn't much I could do to motivate them or convince them it was their problem and not mine. So on a whim I did a random Google search for the error message the server was serving to their error logs. Low and behold there was a solution in the phpBB support community. I posted to that community and the forum guru didn't have a clue, which is why I went back to the hosting service with my complaint. Apparently the problem we had is widespread. When the upgraded phpBB software is installed, it either turns off a critical php function or that function is not enabled by the server administrator. Flipping the switch, or adding the proper extension to php, is the fix. I copied the article and sent it to the helpdesk. 20 minutes later everything was working again, and no backup, no moving to a new server, and no tweaks were necessary.
In their final reply they encouraged me to make backups before I do any upgrade. Believe me, if it wasn't for this frickin' pandemic I'd be on an airplane on my way to their office to read them their fortune.
Anyway, I have to clean up the mess in that archive directory and attempt to upgrade the second archive site. I presume that will all go well and the final step would be to upgrade this site. There are a couple new things I think I'll be trying, and of course you will be the first to know about them. Nobody else would care. Plus, with any luck at all, the problem you have with automatic log off might be resolved.
Re: SPECIAL NOTE
Sounds like a hair pulling experience. But I'm glad you finally found out what file was missing that was causing the problems.
The frau called me to lunch over 20 minutes ago, so I guess my lunch is cold by now.
The frau called me to lunch over 20 minutes ago, so I guess my lunch is cold by now.
Re: SPECIAL NOTE
This is not the first time the hosting service help desk was not very helpful, and even misleading. I've been using their services for the entire time this site has been on the Internet, 16 years. The amazing part about that is the names of the help desk people have not changed in all those years. The same people I dealt with the first year are STILL there today. A few times I had to get their supervisor involved. I liked that because it was communicating with somebody on equal terms. We spoke the same language. And that seems to be part of the problem, by the way. I'll explain something and the help desk jock replies as if he never read what I wrote. My guess is he did read it but can't understand it. Then again, they do fix things eventually. It's just a PITA to get them to do it. I realize it's not always a server problem, in which case all I need is a credible explanation of why they can't handle it. The supervisor would do that, but none of the peons seem to have that ability.
At any rate, both our archive sites are now upgraded. The second upgrade went flawlessly as I expected it would. However, the server is still generating error messages that are similar, but not exactly the same, as the original ones. So far those errors are not affecting the operation of the archive sites, but that's due to those sites being inactive most of the time. I'll be updating this site soon and then we will have a chance to see what the errors really can do. LOL I'm not going to open a trouble ticket until this site us up and running to my satisfaction.
At any rate, both our archive sites are now upgraded. The second upgrade went flawlessly as I expected it would. However, the server is still generating error messages that are similar, but not exactly the same, as the original ones. So far those errors are not affecting the operation of the archive sites, but that's due to those sites being inactive most of the time. I'll be updating this site soon and then we will have a chance to see what the errors really can do. LOL I'm not going to open a trouble ticket until this site us up and running to my satisfaction.
Re: SPECIAL NOTE
I've only had two problems with my website hosts, but then I'm not complex either.
The first was WordPress where I tried to host my Lugoku puzzles.
Every time I found a template that worked great, a few weeks later they would change how it worked.
I finally gave up with WordPress because of that.
The other one was my Cable provider Comcast. THEY chose to discontinue hosting personal pages.
Although they gave us plenty of time to find a new host provider, it was mighty nasty of them to do in the first place.
Had I even had the slightest inkling they would pull a stunt like that, I would have never used their hosting at all.
There is a rumor going around that they are planning on discontinuing mail services other than web mail.
I could move over to my hosting company at no extra charge. But everyone knows me on @comcast now.
The first was WordPress where I tried to host my Lugoku puzzles.
Every time I found a template that worked great, a few weeks later they would change how it worked.
I finally gave up with WordPress because of that.
The other one was my Cable provider Comcast. THEY chose to discontinue hosting personal pages.
Although they gave us plenty of time to find a new host provider, it was mighty nasty of them to do in the first place.
Had I even had the slightest inkling they would pull a stunt like that, I would have never used their hosting at all.
There is a rumor going around that they are planning on discontinuing mail services other than web mail.
I could move over to my hosting company at no extra charge. But everyone knows me on @comcast now.
Re: SPECIAL NOTE
My buddy who has a home business in Tennessee (of all places) bought the domain using his last name. It's pretty obvious who the message is from when the domain name spells out his name. I don't know who is hosting his mail, but he has been with that company and e-mail service ever since he started the company. It certainly would be a major PIA if you suddenly had to change your well known e-maill address, but then there are ways around that. Most mail servers have a forwarding function that you can use until everyone updates their contact list. I did that for about a year when I moved down here and changed e-mail providers. In my case I have several different accounts in several places so that the one that changed didn't shut me off entirely. Besides, I don't have that many contacts who needed to change my address.
I'm pretty sure I'll be updating this site later on this afternoon. By the time you read this, things most likely will have changed. I may have to alter the style so that it will all look different for a while, but once I fine tune the details things should return back to normal again.
I'm pretty sure I'll be updating this site later on this afternoon. By the time you read this, things most likely will have changed. I may have to alter the style so that it will all look different for a while, but once I fine tune the details things should return back to normal again.
Re: SPECIAL NOTE
My e-mail for over 25 years was RAIAR@slacc.com (St. Louis Area Computing Club), I also had GaryD@slacc.com
I kept it even though my websites were on both Inlink.com and our BBS which became BBS.Galilei.com., even after I moved south.
I could use the local U.S. Bank dial-up to access my accounts back home so all was good.
I was living down here about four or five years before we got Cable Internet. This came about when Debi's son graduated college and moved in with us for a short time, until he got his apartment. I used his cable, and after he moved and we took over the cable account, I started a new website on Comcast's personal use servers.
I've already mentioned in the past how I lost my CHL domain name, and Comcast didn't allow you to use your own name on their personal use servers. I figured I would be with them until I die anyhow, since they are the only Cable in town. Little did I know they would some day decide to turn off access to their hosting servers.
When they did that, they WOULD NOT FORWARD requests to your new host. Because they literally turned off those servers.
What I need to be doing is setting up e-mail accounts under my domain name, so if Comcast turns off their SMTP and POP servers I won't be left high and dry. There is some rumors that they may do just that, and force folks over to web mail only.
Seems like your upgrade went without a hitch, except for everything going back to default settings.
I kept it even though my websites were on both Inlink.com and our BBS which became BBS.Galilei.com., even after I moved south.
I could use the local U.S. Bank dial-up to access my accounts back home so all was good.
I was living down here about four or five years before we got Cable Internet. This came about when Debi's son graduated college and moved in with us for a short time, until he got his apartment. I used his cable, and after he moved and we took over the cable account, I started a new website on Comcast's personal use servers.
I've already mentioned in the past how I lost my CHL domain name, and Comcast didn't allow you to use your own name on their personal use servers. I figured I would be with them until I die anyhow, since they are the only Cable in town. Little did I know they would some day decide to turn off access to their hosting servers.
When they did that, they WOULD NOT FORWARD requests to your new host. Because they literally turned off those servers.
What I need to be doing is setting up e-mail accounts under my domain name, so if Comcast turns off their SMTP and POP servers I won't be left high and dry. There is some rumors that they may do just that, and force folks over to web mail only.
Seems like your upgrade went without a hitch, except for everything going back to default settings.
Re: SPECIAL NOTE
Back in the old days I signed up with Earthlink, which had some major presence on the Sprint network. It was all DSL back then and top speed ultimately came to be 6Mb downloads. Along with the DSL, I got some web server space which they didn't seem to care much about. It was small and I had to use their front end instead of FTP, but I had a few small sites running there just because I could. I also stored some unlinked data files on that server and never thought twice about it. They never said anything probably because of the ultra low usage of that service. And, they also offered e-mail. One of the cool things about their e-mail was that I could make ten bogus accounts and they would all be delivered to my mailbox. Those bogus accounts were honeypots for spam but my wife used one of them for her regular mail. So, I had DSL, Email, and a web hosting service with Earthlink.
When the time came to move they said they have a presence down here in Missouri and I could just transfer the account. I didn't want DSL anymore and told them "no thank you" but could I keep the e-mail with Earthlink. Sure, for a small fee I could do that. And I did. That account had settings which allowed for forwarding, and that is what we did until my wife transitioned completely to G-mail. As far as I know Earthlink still exists and I could get my e-mail from them if I chose to. They had a POP server and I used Thunderbird for the local client for a long time. Interestingly enough Microsoft's Hotmail didn't offer SMTP and POP for many years. Or, more correctly, you could subscribe to get those features. Then Microsoft changed their ways and POP is now free but limited. I never get enough to go beyond the quota which is only on the sending side anyway.
The people hosting this website will also provide e-mail service for any domain they host. I've not asked about personal domains, but it seems likely they would do it if I bought it from them. Even if you had to have a deutchman.com website to get the mail too, it would be kind of cool to be a dot-com. LOL I'm paying less than $10/mo for this site hosting and (pretty sure) I can have ten email accounts for that price. In that case I'd have to die and stop paying them before they discontinued anything.
When the time came to move they said they have a presence down here in Missouri and I could just transfer the account. I didn't want DSL anymore and told them "no thank you" but could I keep the e-mail with Earthlink. Sure, for a small fee I could do that. And I did. That account had settings which allowed for forwarding, and that is what we did until my wife transitioned completely to G-mail. As far as I know Earthlink still exists and I could get my e-mail from them if I chose to. They had a POP server and I used Thunderbird for the local client for a long time. Interestingly enough Microsoft's Hotmail didn't offer SMTP and POP for many years. Or, more correctly, you could subscribe to get those features. Then Microsoft changed their ways and POP is now free but limited. I never get enough to go beyond the quota which is only on the sending side anyway.
The people hosting this website will also provide e-mail service for any domain they host. I've not asked about personal domains, but it seems likely they would do it if I bought it from them. Even if you had to have a deutchman.com website to get the mail too, it would be kind of cool to be a dot-com. LOL I'm paying less than $10/mo for this site hosting and (pretty sure) I can have ten email accounts for that price. In that case I'd have to die and stop paying them before they discontinued anything.
Last edited by yogi on 06 Mar 2021, 17:45, edited 1 time in total.
Re: SPECIAL NOTE
Many long years ago, even though I was on the BBS, which provided 1 e-mail account. I tried Dial-Up AOL. Biggest mistake of my life. They were constantly downloading upgrades they called art or something like that. Most of their upgrades took hours to download as well. When they billed me over 300 dollars for the time spent downloading THEIR upgrades, I turned them off completely. Still had to pay their exorbitant fees though through the end of my contract, but with no usage, or upgrade downloads, it was at their base rate of like 10 bucks a month for the remaining four months of the contract.
And folks wondered why it was called AOHell, hi hi.
I did try DSL after I moved south, but they could never get it to work here, due to the bad telephone lines.
Debi's father tried for 30 years to get them to fix the phone lines and they never did.
Those same lines that were there when I moved in, are still there today, 20 years later.
Almost nobody down here uses a landline anymore, they either use cell phones or if they want a house phone they use a VOIP service like I do.
They do advertise DSL for my area, but the installers know it is impossible to do here, hi hi.
As an aside: I noticed Comcast was installing some new type of WiFi box along their cable route up along the main roadway into our subdivision. Too far away for our use, nearly a half mile. But that road is heavily used and I've heard they now have mobile WiFi connections. Have no idea how that works, maybe like how cell phones jump from tower to tower. But most of these boxes they are installing on utility poles are near things like restaurants, motels, taverns, and places where people congregate.
And folks wondered why it was called AOHell, hi hi.
I did try DSL after I moved south, but they could never get it to work here, due to the bad telephone lines.
Debi's father tried for 30 years to get them to fix the phone lines and they never did.
Those same lines that were there when I moved in, are still there today, 20 years later.
Almost nobody down here uses a landline anymore, they either use cell phones or if they want a house phone they use a VOIP service like I do.
They do advertise DSL for my area, but the installers know it is impossible to do here, hi hi.
As an aside: I noticed Comcast was installing some new type of WiFi box along their cable route up along the main roadway into our subdivision. Too far away for our use, nearly a half mile. But that road is heavily used and I've heard they now have mobile WiFi connections. Have no idea how that works, maybe like how cell phones jump from tower to tower. But most of these boxes they are installing on utility poles are near things like restaurants, motels, taverns, and places where people congregate.