Forums Maintenance

[administrator]

Due to a failed software upgrade initiated by our hosting provider, in combination with a hardware failure in the backup system, we had to restore the forums from backup and currently have only been able to restore posts as of 1:10AM on Friday, August 31st.

We are working on retrieving additional posts, and have blocked new posts during the interim so that they don't interfere with the restore process. You can read posts, but you cannot reply or create new threads.

Thank you for your patience and please accept my apologies for the lost posts from today. We are working to restore as much as we can, as quickly as possible.

- Jeff

[administrator]

My apologies, due to an undetected failure in our hosting provider's backup system, we were unable to recover any of the posts, PMs, or user registrations made between 1:10AM and 8PM today.

Advance Warning: we will be re-attempting the software upgrade on Tuesday 9/4, so the forums will be down for approximately 2 hours on Tuesday afternoon. I will personally make sure that *multiple, independent* backups are made prior to the next software upgrade.

Once again, please accept my apologies for the lost posts and for the extended forum outage this evening.

Sincerely,
Jeff Mendenhall

[smilingcat]

Thank you for trying Jeff. Things like this happens every once in a while. The attempted software upgrade either crashed because of hardware failure or software crash could have triggered a fault in the hardware. Never know which came first.

Do appreciate it very much for keeping us in the loop.

Many many thanks for all the work in keeping the site up.

Sincerely,

PS. I know the frustration first hand and all too familiar. My "customer" does not have much patience when things go south. Disk crashes, failed motherboards, failed 3G/4G connection to corrupted OS. And lost data because scheduled back up didn't finish seconds before something broke.

[Catrin]

Thank you for all of your work, it is greatly appreciated. These things do happen. I was a bit perplexed at 5:30 this morning, and just didn't see your sticky. That was, however, on less than 5 hours of sleep which likely had something to do with it :)

[zoom-zoom]

No biggie. The world still turns even if a few posts disappear. :)

[Possegal]

Sometimes I'd like the power to reset my life back 24-hrs. :)

No worries, and thanks for all the hard work.

[Koronin]

It's alright. Things happen.

[Trek420]

Thanks Jeff for all the work that you do. That masterpiece I posted at 1:12 am ... it's probably best that nobody read it. ;) :rolleyes: :p

Anyone noticed that TE is having a close-out sale? 60 % off on select gear and you can take up to 20 % off more if you buy lots of gear.

[bmccasland]

Sometimes I'd like the power to reset my life back 24-hrs. :)

Thanks for all your hard work Jeff. Riding herd on this crowd must be a challenge. I yield to things electronic. I'd be in the stone age, painting on cave walls.

[indysteel]

Off topic, but TE's website looks really different today. Has anyone else noticed this? Photos of products aren't showing up and it just looks, well, odd (no offense Susan and Jeff if these changes were intentional).

[administrator]

Hi Indysteel,

We haven't made any changes and aren't seeing anything unusual from our end...

To All,
Is anyone else seeing oddness on the TE ecommerce site? If so, please let us know - we want to fix it! :-)

[Blueberry]

To All,
Is anyone else seeing oddness on the TE ecommerce site? If so, please let us know - we want to fix it! :-)

Looking OK for me.

[zoom-zoom]

Looks good on my end.

[indysteel]

Gosh, what's going on at my end? Huh. The best I can describe how it looks to me is what a site might look like when you pull it up on a Blackberry versus an iPhone. But maybe something weird is going on with Firefox on my end. Totally weird.

ETA: I just pulled the site up on my iPhone and it looks fine. It must be a problem on my end. DH is the computer inclined between us; I'll have him take a look when he gets home.

Sorry for the false alarm, Jeff et al.

[administrator]

Hi Indy,

It may be that the cached copy of the stylesheet used to format the page is corrupt in your browser. Try holding down CTRL key and clicking the browser refresh button. If that doesn't work, try CTRL+SHIFT and refresh.

See also:
http://www.refreshyourcache.com/en/cache/
and
http://superuser.com/questions/17464/difference-between-ctrlrefresh-and-ctrlshiftrefresh

[indysteel]

Well, shoot. Neither of those tricks worked.

Sorry for the thread jack. :o