*Server problems! *

Webmaster

Hi all,

As you may have noticed, we are having some technical problems today. We are working on this and hope to have it solved before the end of the day. I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused or causes.

Johan

Webmaster

Although the server and site are currently running fine, we'll probably be down a couple of times again throughout the day. The reason we've been down relatively long, is that it happened right after I closed my eyes last night... Ah well, we should still be able to reach the 99.5% uptime this year.

RussS

Dang it Johan - how many times have I told you that when you are playing a quake tournament using the server as a workstation it crashes

JDMurray

Johan could blame his hosting service, but he knows better than to "mess with Texas."

Webmaster

RussS wrote:

Dang it Johan - how many times have I told you that when you are playing a quake tournament using the server as a workstation it crashes

Our hosting service is too great to blame anything. I'm sure I mentioned them before, but they certainly deserve a personal recommendation: www.ev1servers.net. From experience with many larger hosting companies, and horror-stories from other webmasters, I consider it the only option.

The real problem was a bug in our bandwidth manager, causing postgress to hang everything. After trying to fix a bug that shouldn't even be in this version, we decided to kill this non-essential software and the bug with it. At the same time this saves us some server resources, which allowed me to assign a bit more to the db system. I'm not sure if you actually can notice it, but the forums should respond faster now. I noticed the difference right after the changes yesterday but got used to it very quickly.

Webmaster

Unfortunately, as you may have noticed, our server is still not operating as it should. Although I quickly blamed my own lack of Linux expertise, I have two experts working on it right now and it doesn't seem to be a simple issue. Which saves my ego a bit, but hasn't helped the situation yet.

Again, I'm very sorry for the inconvenience. It sucks waking up and not being able to open TechExams.net. Especially after 2 hours sleep and a major headache. Anyway, if this problem cannot be solved definitely this week, I'm going to move the site to a brand new server this weekend. Which is a lot of work by itself, so I hope that can be prevented.

Thanks for your patience and please bare with us until we solved this.

jescab

Keep up the good work Johan. We will be right here waiting for it to come back up. We are not going anywhere.

Hope you can get your existing server up and running.

Webmaster

Thanks for the kind words jescab. I can take an occassional hickup, I just hate it when it's down for hours in a row, especially since it's thousand of miles away and I have to rely on others. Which are very capable but still...

jescab

I understand........

Webmaster

It looks like some progress has been made, but I'm not a hundred percent confident yet until it stays up and running for a couple of days without any major delays in responding to requests, so I'll leave this sticky up for now.. I just bought a case RedBull, it's going to be a loooong night

sprkymrk

By golly, with all this downtime I demand a refund!

Oh wait, it's free.

Dang.

I mean awesome!

Webmaster

Someone will be working on our server tonight trying to work out a permanent solution, so you it may be down from time-to-time. If that happens, we 'will' be back tomorrow.

Johan