I see. Thanks.

Another data point: I just now received an email saying that I had a new private message -- for a message that actually was sent and arrived in my PM box 38 hours ago.

Some change(s) they made broke something. And therefore they had a "learning experience". The symptoms are classic: system doesn't work after scheduled downtime, and instead of just returning the system to the original configuration, they just bulled their way through to "success". And no one really wants to talk about the self-inflicted period of living hell.

I just hope that the lesson they learned was not "when doing X to an operating system, don't do Y", but rather "don't ever do X to an operating system until it's been thoroughly tested on a test system, and have an upgrade plan such that if X doesn't work even after being tested (as it sometimes won't), we can revert to the pre-upgrade setup very quickly". If they think the lesson is the first and not the second, they think they're smarter than they really are. Which really means they're just smart enough to be dangerous, because it means that think they can always take into account every contingency instead of facing the reality that they can't. No one can.

When trying to do X, there's always the possibility that something will come up that either prevents you from doing X or stops X from working. Dismissing that possibility because you can't think of how that could happen is underestimating reality and overestimating your ability to comprehend reality, and unfortunately that's all too common in the IT field. Heck, I'm sure there a quite a few people reading this post thinking, "That won't ever happen to me because I'm smarter than that, and I do cover all bases."

In my experience, the best IT personnel are the ones that are smart enough to know how smart they really are and who never try to be smarter than that. No "Hey, I think this might work" cowboy-ops on operational systems, no competitions to see who can write the most obscure C++ or Perl code. And no untested changes to operational systems.

It seems as though the problems of accessing FlyerTalk have been resolved for me as well at this time.

Thank you, John at Webflyer!

Er...do I thank anyone else as well who may have worked on resolving this issue? I have no idea who does what over there...

This problem was a complex one that had to do with hardware limitations and a DNS configuration that we had to retract. Unfortunately when you retract a DNS entry, it is not updated across the internet simultaneously and is cached by many servers... now that this seems to be updated in most cases, I'm glad to hear that things are at least close to back to normal. Thanks,

Wow. I have almost never seen such an incorrect analysis of a situation in my life.

Ah, well. I am grateful for the work done. Sorry if the communication of frustration was grating. From one in the communication business, a kindly intended suggestion: communicate. A short post that "we're on this ... it may take some time" would have kept many of the troublesome emails and speculation from being ... well, troublesome.

thanks again.

Agree 100%. Please see my post about posting to another server in times of trouble, just to let people know what is going on.

Nice one John :)

You're probably too busy to read some the Republican analyses in OMNI! ;)

You're making a lot of assumptions here. As someone who is in IT Management for a large company (large enough you've all heard of it), you can't test everything before implementation... without extreme costs. (Try simulating millions of customers from around the world hitting your web servers before live production). You can test, test, test, and then still implement and have unforseen issues, possibly out of your control. Not all changes are easy to back out.

All the best websites have experienced extended downtimes. Depends on loss of revenue on how much resources you put towards a fix.... in this case.... the loss of revenue isn't huge so I doubt FT would spend what someone like Amazon.com would spend to get things up and running again.

Don't just assume the guys behind FT are a bunch of cowboys with no testing or change control skills. They provide this site at no cost to you... so do you really want to badmouth them?

Well said

Speaking of which...other forums (provided as "freebies") have a mechanism for donations...is there one here?

All the best, James

Yes. FlyerTalk Premium

Thanks! Done.

All the best, James

Sorry - it appears there are problems of which I suspect you are fully aware of. In case it matters, as of 8:30 p.m. Pacific 12/20/05:

• www.flyertalk.com times out
• web1.flyertalk.com works
• web2.flyertalk.com times out
• http://64.78.185.85/ works
• http://64.78.185.92/ times out

Only web1 is working for me, albeit slowly and most of the graphics don't download

I also am only able to pull up web1, but it loads normally with all graphics and rather quickly.

Web1 is working for me right now - isnt FT like a ghost town at the moment. Perhaps we should log off if it helps the techies fix the problem?

This explains why I thought I was all alone.

Still only web1.flyertalk.com...

still not better :(

This is how I get in when the "www" approach is down. Thanks for the other options. :)

Flyertalk down for 14 hours?
 

I have the impression that FT was down for the last 14 hours - finally I can relax again!

SmilingBoy.

I thought it was just AOL being AOL :D

either flyertalk or aol did something!

Yeah - I was starting to worry how I'd ever make it through a boring day at work... :p

peace,
~Ben~

figured it would start up around now - being when people in the U.S. show up to work & presumably turn the switch back on. no good for us over here.

and i thought it was just me....

yeah i thought i did something wrong and got denied access :P

any explanation?
 

Same as with others - wondering what was going on, thinking it must be a problem on my end, finally concluding the problem was with Flyer Talk. But this is not the first time this has happened. Does any sort of general announcement get posted to explain the outage afterwards? If so, where? Are these unanticipated "crashes" or planned interruptions for "maintenance"? Since this and prior interruptions have been overnight (the US perspective) rather than during the course of a day, I thought the system might have been intentionally shut down. Does anyone know?

It was an unplanned interruption. Planned interruptions are announced.

but no email notifications for subscribed threads yet :confused:

is it just me ?

should start soon.

thank you very much :) ^

Everything seems to be fine now, except the notifications of threads subsribed to does not seem to be working - at least I'm not getting any.

Perhaps a helpful moderator will merge this duplicate thread into the primary thread on the same topic?

That's what we mods are here for - customer service, and this is a good idea. Consider this merged.....

Mahalo, Randy. ^ Please thank your staff as well for fixing whatever the menehunes did to the servers last night.

Search is returning me just a blank page. No failure. No 404. Just blank.

Is this just me or is it happening to others?

(Search is broken, so I can't search to see if this is recurring...)

Did We Lose Some Posts?
 

Noticed that since the most recent downtime, that some posts made the day before seem to have disappeared. Was something done to the servers that might have dropped a few posts when they were brought back up?

Anyone else notice this?

Thanks,

bj-21.