SimRacing.org.uk

DataFlame have once again pulled the rug from under my feet by moving us between servers without any notification beyond a notice in a cabinet in the basement behind a locked door with no stairs or light under a notice which reads, "beware of the leopard".

Things should return to normal over the next few hours and no PMs or forum messages should have been lost. I will need to import the Magny Cours results from last night again but other than that we appear to have got off lightly.

I am now looking at making alternative hosting arrangements.

Everything seems to be pretty much back to normal again.

Please report any wierdness which is not normal. :laugh:

What, do you mean like 'Legends Racing' ;D

Got a habit of this have't they  ::), thanks for all the hard work Dave  :)

:sleep1: :sleep1:

I'm sorry - I thought some original abuse woke me from my slumber ..... I was wrong ;D.




It seems to be behaving itself again now after being down first thing.

Hit them over the Head with a big stick. Thanks for all your hard work mate. It doesnt go unappreciated.

Ant

ditto!  :) (the last bit)

Does anyone have any experience of HostICan (http://www.hostican.com)? They're US-based which isn't ideal but reviews are mostly very positive, and they provide a lot more than DataFlame for slightly less money.

Well I've gone ahead and signed up for a HostICan account. I won't migrate the site until after the end of Season 5 which gives me a few weeks to test things out.

Testing is going well and I'm planning to make the switch to the new host over the weekend of August 4/5. Most likely I will turn the site off  late on August 3rd and aim to be back up by Sunday August 5th. though it may take a day or two longer for the DNS change to propagate. More news closer to the time.

Hi Dave,

Can you turn the TTL down on your current hosting platform? So that DNS takes a lot shorter to propagate?

I should add that this site has been unreachable for the past 2 hours or so, today.

The 123-reg control panel doesn't give me that option; I believe it hands out domain entries with a TTL of 48 hours. When the new site is ready to go live you will be able to hack your hosts file to point to the same address as davegymer.org to get to it but probably best to just be patient.


Odd - admittedly I've been down t'pub for an hour but it was working okay just before I left. Could be a problem at or near your end?

The replays have now been moved to the new server; the first new replay will be tomorrow night's Endurance Clubmen, so if you download it, please report any wrongness, slowness or other badness.

Downloads have also been moved, but it will take a day or two for the DNS change to propagate. You should not see any visible change for those.

That's likely to be the last visible change until we do the proper move.

5 minutes of possible trauma tomorrow (Sunday) night:


What a shame I could do the move this weekend!

Will that interfer with the Imola Masters?

The game server itself is elsewhere and should be okay, but it does mean that reserves especially shouldn't leave it until the last minute to check the password.

Or server starters  :whistling: Better go make a note, thanks for the subtle hint  ;D

The "about 9pm" happened at 19:45 - it's back now and should stay so.

BTW, testing of the new server has gone very well and I'm taking the opportunity to make some fairly major structural changes to the web site and forums which I hope everybody will like...

Good luck with that Dave, I know how traumatic moving a website between hosts can be!

Fingers crossed!

From DataFlame following Sunday's attempted 'upgrade' which hit us a few minutes before the Endurance Masters began:


If we're lucky we'll have switched hosts (this weekend) before they get round to it.

If only we had decent home broadband options in the UK I would run my team website at home and probably rewrite everything in ASP so I had all the functionality I actually wanted.  :laugh: :laugh:

Don't forget, the switch will start tonight which means that I will be turning the existing site off sometime this evening (Friday nights aren't usually busy times on the forum in any case). Hopefully I will get to the stage where I can flip the DNS entries late tonight, in which case most of you will see the new site by Sunday morning at the latest, Monday morning at the absolutely worst.

Good luck with that Dave.

Hope you`ve got plenty of Anadin Extra to hand!   ;D

Cheers

Rob

I've done a dry run of the process already so I'm not expecting any real problems. I just hope everyone likes the move of championship standings, event details and so on out of the portal and into the forums.

I've occasionally found looking up results, etc. requires a couple of 'F5' presses before getting the info up, so having the info in the forums should be pretty cool 8)

Everything's so much easier when compared to using Yahoo back in the day, I'm sure everyone appreciates the time & effort you guys put in to keep improving it :)

Either you're not being patient enough or you've got a problem your end - the main thing that slows the current site down is the RSS feeds and I'm junking those except for the weather one (which is needed for the random weather files, and will now be pulled behind the scenes every 30 minutes instead of during page building).

Hopefully the new host's location in the US won't be a problem - it shouldn't be as critical as the location of the game server anyway!