Server Blog

[asavage]

We seem to be having a problem sending email to members. I just tried, and got an error:

=================================================
Ran into problems sending Mail. Response: 472 asavage@iname.com DNS transaction timeout

DEBUG MODE

Line : 144
File : smtp.php
=================================================

I'll look into this tonight.

[asavage]

I added Google as a tertiary DNS nameserver, and could not repeat the email error. I "guess" it's fixed (?).

[waynosworld]

I am having a lot of trouble lately getting on here, I have received many messages saying that I am unable to connect to this forum if I even get a message at all, sometimes it just sits there for long periods of time trying to connect till I get tired of waiting and close the window.
Are there issues, or is it me?

[plenzen]

Might be you.
I just signed in and it opened straight away.

[waynosworld]

Might be you.
I just signed in and it opened straight away.

Sometimes it works great, but other times I cannot get on at all, I have no issues logging on the other 2 forums I am on.
It's been the last few days only, that is why I was asking.

[asavage]

It's a huge problem.

I don't know what I've changed, but we are seeing some process take over all the CPU cycles on the server. It goes to 99.9% CPU utilization, and I've been unable to figure out what is causing it. Killing all the foreground processes isn't helping. I'm aware of the problem, but I don't know what to roll back to get it to stop.

Please bear with me. I"ll keep working on it.

[waynosworld]

Thankyou I shut everything down and deleted all my cookies and was able to get back in, but I don't know if it was me or you with good timing that fixed my issue, we shall see.
Thankyou again

wayne

[asavage]

It's on this end. It was at 99.9% CPU utilization again when I got up this morning.

I just backleveled one module, and disabled another completely, and I will monitor it as often as I can.

With this particular problem, I can't reboot it via VNC on my phone like I usually can. I can nuke the power to the server via phone, but that tends to trash the database (which is what this forum really runs on) so I prefer to not do that.

I'll keep on it. It's annoying that my usual toolset is not working for me on this one.

[asavage]

I think I've got the emoticons fixed. It was an errant rewrite rule in the httpd conf that I'd added to reduce the amount of errors in the log file from phishers trying to hack the system. It was redirecting to the wrong site, but even when redirecting to the correct site, it blocks emoticons, so I just commented it out. Nice try, Al.

On the slow site issue, I think it's the Samba/EVFS that is giving me fits. I disabled it and haven't seen a reoccurrence of the issue in a day. I'll keep monitoring it. It's going to really suck if that's the issue, though.

[plenzen]

Thanks again Al for keeping us going

[asavage]

The Motorola SB5121 that I purchased new in Jan2013, and which has required exactly one power cycle in all that time, crapped out this week. It was failing to allow a DHCP lease renewal from one to several times per day, for the past six days. It has a one year warranty

Today, I bought a Zoom 5341J cable modem and installed it. It has a two-year warranty and gets about the same user feedback rating as the Motorola unit. Time will tell . . .

[asavage]

I've been sick the past week, and have been staying home from work (got a note from a doctor on Saturday). Nothing serious, but it's given me more time to work on this board than I've had since I rejoined the work force Jun2013, 11 months ago.

To review: the forum (board) software is v2.0.22 or so, which was more or less abandoned for v3 about, oh, four or five years ago. However, one of the MODs I installed for v2 has no v3 counterpart, and I have been trying, unsuccessfully, for the past five years to hire a phpBB3 MOD developer to add that MOD's functionality.

Meanwhile, I installed a test version of the latest v3 board software, v3.0.12, and I've been chipping away at that problem myself. I do not write any significant code anymore, haven't for years, and I know next-to-nothing about OOP, which is the current dominant paradigm for coding in several popular high-level languages, among them php, the language of this board.

Years ago I'd looked at the problem and guessed that it would take me about a man-month to code the MOD I need in phpBB3, and I wasn't far off: I think I've done it, and it only took about three man-weeks.

The patches I've written and implemented on the test site, they're not -- probably -- the best way of tackling the problem, but I looked at better, more elegant ways to do it and decided it would take yet another man-week, and left well enough alone.

The solution was about 20 lines of code across three files. Most of that is comments. The rest of the time was trying to understand the OOP php code, and I'm not pretending that I do, only enough to get the job done.

The final product is an non-feature-complete phpBB3 implementation of the phpBB2 MOD "Anchor MOD 1.0.4". That's the must-have MOD that lets us use the bbCodes [anchor], [goto], and [gotopost], that organizes the FAQ (for example) and lets us use non-URL references to other posts (ie reference another post using post ID numbers, instead of URLs). There are hundreds of these references, maybe thousands, in this board's posts, and I couldn't migrate to the newer phpBB3 until I could make them work.

• [anchor] works the same as it always has. Use it to create a anchor point, to point the [goto] tags to.
• [goto] works the same as it always has: point [goto] to an anchor, and a link is created to that anchor. [goto] only works within the same post as the [anchor] it points to. It's kind of limiting that way, and it's probably rarely used here.
• [gotopost] I had to break into two separate bbcodes: [gotopost] and [gotopost2].
  • [gotopost] now works only for referring to a different post, not to an [anchor] within that post (it used to do both).
  • [gotopost2] is the new, separate bbCode for referring to a specific anchorname within a separate post.

Most of you don't use any of these bbCodes, but I use them a lot, and they needed to work for legacy formatting at the least.

Now, with that hurdle out of the way, I am preparing to actually cut over from the old board to the new one. Exciting times.

One of the most-requested features that the new board software offers built-in, is native file attachments. That means no more having to host your pics elsewhere. The ajax viewer is pretty cool, too. I wish the overall look of the included theme was better, but it can be lived with.

Expect the cut-over sometime soon. I know I've been promising file hosting here for at least seven years, but I think we're really close now.

[asavage]

Last night, I began receiving Yahoo! email bounce notifications. Yahoo!'s email acceptance policy recently changed (see https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN7253.html?impressions=true and http://blog.returnpath.com/blog/christi ... ect-policy) and it's rejecting some email. I'll look into this tonight.

Meanwhile, people with yahoo.com email addresses may not receive email sent from this board.

[asavage]

The problem is when you send an email to someone from the board, and have the "Send a copy to my email" option checked (which is the default).

If you do that, and have a yahoo.com email address, I get a bounce message and you do not get the copy. But the original still gets to the intended target.

I do not know how I'll fix this one yet -- Google is not revealing that anyone else is having the problem with this board software. I assume that the fix is to patch the board so that it sets the From: to "nissandiesel" instead of the sender.

[asavage]

Following on the the previous: the email problem is not present in the new version of the forum software, so I'm not going to bother trying to patch the old version.

So, today, 27Apr2014, I'm making the transition from phpBB2 v2.0.23 with mods, to v3.0.12 with mods.

Let's try it out and see what's broken.

What's new? Native file hosting via attachments. Try it out.

Sorry about the ugly interface. It's call "subsilver", and believe me it's better than the "prosilver" that's the default. Not a lot I can do about it right now. There are supposedly other themes, and I'll look into those someday.