Ahhhh. Much better. Thanks.

What was wrong? There has been very little communication from flyertalk tech other than to say that the site has never been down.

The site has been "All Jacked Up" lately and they should have sent an email to all of us acknowledgin it.

It seems things are back to normal now. I've been surfing for about 10 minutes and am very happy. I guess your guys finally got rid of the mole.

Thanks for whoever's working on this issue!

John, could you clarify? Are your saying that FTers doing something inappropriate that adds to the problem?

I understood him to mean that the e-mails that the software automatically sends to the tech department every time the software messes up adds to the problem by swamping them.

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?