Important: Stirpes Forums Server will be down ...

[Menydh]

Please, notice that there is going to be some major changes in the server where Stirpes Forums are hosted. These changes will (hopefully) improve noticeably the server's performance.

Unfortunately, for this to happen there will have to be downtimes during which Stirpes will not be available. I hope to be able to minimize this as much as possible, but the schedule is really bad as I'm working around a very tight deadline.

Timeshow may start anytime between Thursday and Saturday, and it could last from a few hours to a few days. Stay tuned.


Thank You

[Menydh]

The upgrade turned into a crisis. Now it's over. I'm sorry that it has lasted longer than planned and expected.

For your information, we have migrated to a new server. Stirpes old server had got too old and unstable. However, I must say that it did performed very well on its heydays, and it has given us a good service through these years... I received the email letting me know that the dedicated server was ready on May 5, 2005. That's 2 years and nearly 9 months now. Before that we were on a crappy shared server since the end of December 2004.

The trouble with this migration has been due to several factors:

1. It was a very tight deadline. I saw the chance to contract the new server for a full year, with a 10% discount and a favourable exchange rate. The downside was that the contract term with the old server expired in only a few days from the moment that the new one was ready, and I also had duties that kept me away from home for part of that time. So there was not time for tests, only to pack and move.
2. A graphical control panel with the ability to perform the migrations, failed miserable because of an incompatibility of versions. Everything had to be done through the command line console.
3. The Stirpes software includes much more than just the official forums software. There are many additional add-ons and modifications, some of which date back to the days when someone else was in charge of the technical side of Stirpes, and he didn't document the modficiations. That has always been a source of trouble. But one big piece that I installed has been the worse nightmares of all.
4. The Stirpes database is now a big 250+MB ball, with different types of data and metadata. To edit the database to try to troubleshoot problems is complicated, and it also crashed the powerful UNIX vi editor which I've used for it. Eventually, I had to extract the tables individually from the dump of the database, search for offending lines (such as directory paths from the old server, that had been written into the database by some software and which produced many errors), and reimport them into the restored database, once and again, debugging problems on a trial by error fashion.

Some functionalities have been temporarily disabled, until more cleaning up is done. I'll do some more testing in the coming weeks, but outside of the forums.

Anyway, the trouble is past now and we are back on the frontline, if only to disappoint to those who were happily celebrating our funeral. It has been very encouraging to see how there was a strong sense of community and support, in the provided temporary forum (I'll try to import the threads here, but that's not a priority now).


So thank you so much to all of you, for your patience and for your encouraging support. Out of justice, it has to be said that Stirpes has shown to be a true online community of European Nationalists.. and it rocks!

[Hegumen]

Originally Posted by Mynydd

So thank you so much to all of you, for your patience and for your encouraging support. Out of justice, it has to be said that Stirpes has shown to be a true online community of European Nationalists.. and it rocks!

Damn straight! Good to see the forum up and running again.

[Susi]

I'm having trouble viewing threads wih the formatting.. I have the normal skin in forums/subforums but on a thread it's just white background with black text and the buttons..

[Breogan]

Great job, Mynydd.

[Leland Gaunt]

Originally Posted by Susi

I'm having trouble viewing threads wih the formatting.. I have the normal skin in forums/subforums but on a thread it's just white background with black text and the buttons..

I have the same with user profiles.

[Menydh]

Yes, some features have to be fixed yet. The important part was to restore the posts and users data.

[Arthur Gordon Pym]

Originally Posted by Susi

I'm having trouble viewing threads wih the formatting.. I have the normal skin in forums/subforums but on a thread it's just white background with black text and the buttons..

The same with me. But curiously, not in all threads. In some...

[Leland Gaunt]

I also have a feeling that I lost my latest reputation point. Whoever gave it to me, please repost.

[Menydh]

Originally Posted by Leland Gaunt

I also have a feeling that I lost my latest reputation point. Whoever gave it to me, please repost.

Some people must make more reputation comments, than posts. After extracting the tables from the db, I noticed that the table for reputation took much longer than the average table. In fact it is 4.2MB!!!

[Leland Gaunt]

Originally Posted by Mynydd

Some people must make more reputation comments, than posts. After extracting the tables from the db, I noticed that the table for reputation took much longer than the average table. In fact it is 4.2MB!!!

But that's logical! Forums are all about reputations and not boring discussions if you didn't know that. I believe that my private correspondence with Hohenheim makes a good share of that total MBs used.

[Martín Zalacaín]

Excellent work, Mynydd. Thank's for your time and effort.

[Leland Gaunt]

yes, Hail Mynydd!!!

[Susi]

We love you Mynydddddddd!

[Errigal]

Thanks for all the hard work Mynydd! I spent my time at the Phora doing research for "Freakwatch". It is nice to have Stirpes back; there is a healthy 9:1 ratio of sane to insane people here. At the Phora it is the reverse.

[Menydh]

Alright. Now I think that everything is restored back to how it was just before.

Please, report any oddities.