Website Outages

[xisxisxis]

Don't know if others are having issues, but for about 1-2 weeks now, I am getting errors accessing forums.brewerfan.net at least once a day if not more than once (mostly just a general error that the site is unavailable. Since tuesday I have been getting the following error and today I was unable to access the site for >10 minutes. The error was:

General Error

SQL ERROR [ mysqli ]

 

User seattlepilot already has more than 'max_user_connections' active connections [1203]

 

An sql error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact an administrator if this problem persists.

 

This was coming back from ~11:40AM CST to after 11:50AM CST. What always amazed me was how brewerfan.net was always up no matter what the traffic congestion has been in the past. If others are having the same issue, you might want to check if there was an update recently that is causing an issue because I have seen a noticeable degradation in site availability recently (did not correlate to MLB Draft)...

[reillymcshane]

Don't know if others are having issues, but for about 1-2 weeks now, I am getting errors accessing forums.brewerfan.net at least once a day if not more than once (mostly just a general error that the site is unavailable. Since tuesday I have been getting the following error and today I was unable to access the site for >10 minutes. The error was:

General Error

SQL ERROR [ mysqli ]

 

User seattlepilot already has more than 'max_user_connections' active connections [1203]

 

An sql error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact an administrator if this problem persists.

 

This was coming back from ~11:40AM CST to after 11:50AM CST. What always amazed me was how brewerfan.net was always up no matter what the traffic congestion has been in the past. If others are having the same issue, you might want to check if there was an update recently that is causing an issue because I have seen a noticeable degradation in site availability recently (did not correlate to MLB Draft)...

 

Thanks for the notice.

 

We have noted this problem as well, and are looking into what can be done to correct the problem.

 

On behalf of all the mods, we appreciate your patience with regards to this issue.

[jerichoholicninja]

I've been having this same problem for months now but the last few weeks it has gotten a lot worse. And it's not always the same error.

[homer]

I've been having this same problem for months now but the last few weeks it has gotten a lot worse. And it's not always the same error.

 

Yep. We are currently working on a system so that mods can alert each other outside of the confines of the site once it goes down. Then whomever has availability can contact the appropriate parties to resolve. In retrospect this might seem like something we should have done a long time ago but there wasn't really a need since the site was more or less self sustaining for so long. We do need to have a longer term discussion in regards to site maintenance and stability since the outages are more frequent this season for whatever reason. That will hopefully coincide with the above communication protocol.

 

Long winded way of saying we are aware of it, we are working on it, and it's taking a while to figure out.

[Mass Haas]

Will say that this morning's extended downtime was unrelated to the periodic "few minutes" of unavailability as described above.

 

There was a definite unplanned outage at the hosting site that hosts more of the back-end stuff, and not the actual forum contents. When that was completely down, the forum was as well.

 

They came back up, and we did, along with their other impacted clients.

[xisxisxis]

Four days in a row now with outages about 11AM CST. Starts with this message:

 

Internal Server Error

 

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

 

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@forum.brewerfan.net and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

 

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

 

Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

 

for a few minutes then this message:

 

General Error

SQL ERROR [ mysqli ]

 

User seattlepilot already has more than 'max_user_connections' active connections [1203]

 

An sql error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact an administrator if this problem persists.

 

for more than a few minutes (I believe I was out for >10 minutes today)...

[Ron Robinsons Beard]

This is getting really bad lately. Like multiple times a day it seems. For pretty long periods at a time as well.

[Brian the Automator]

Well, that was a nightmare. My main website provider double-billed me and then a day or 2 later, their entire business seems to have vanished. Brewerfan.net was unreachable, the provider's website (including all means of troubleshooting, reporting issues, etc) has been down, and even their phone number that I had to scour the Earth for has been giving a busy signal for the last 24 hours. They're not responding to email either.

 

So, I've pointed forum.brewerfan.net to a different DNS server (the one that is owned by Dreamhost, the company that hosts the forums), and we're back in business, at least as far as the forums go.

 

I'll be trying to figure out what to do with the rest of the site. Unfortunately, all of that data lives in the database that's hosted by my provider (MMAWeb) that wen't AWOL. I'm hoping that this is related to some sort of catastrophe. Although the fact that they double-billed me for my current month and then vanished into thin air seems like a bit of a red flag.

 

Anyways. Sorry to pop in again under these circumstances.

 

Go Brewers!

-Brian

 

P.S. - free Ginter

[SeaBass]

Understandable, the world happens sometimes. Hopefully things can be resolved with your MIA web provider.

 

I found myself wondering if there was a Twitter resource to check for status updates when technical stuff like this happens?

 

Thanks for all you do, I've no doubt this is a pain in the keester you had no desire to deal with on a beautiful sunny Saturday in June. Go Crew!

[MadThinker88]

At least the outage happened after the draft concluded...

 

Never really a good time for a blackout but some times are worse than others (trade deadlines, draft, season opening, playoff time)....

[Jaylyn]

Thank you Brian! Don't interact a lot here, but this July it will be 16 years checking in on a daily basis. There is no replacement for this site! Thank you again!!!!

[PeaveyFury]

 

I found myself wondering if there was a Twitter resource to check for status updates when technical stuff like this happens?

 

I'd suggest following Mass Haas @Mass_Haas, and/or Toby @YouKnowAndThat. They put out good Brewer content anyway, but posted updates on the status while the site was down as well.

[sveumrules]

Thanks for pulling all the strings (& dealing with all the associated hassles) behind the scenes, Brian.

[clancyphile]

Thanks, Brian.

[adambr2]

 

I found myself wondering if there was a Twitter resource to check for status updates when technical stuff like this happens?

 

I'd suggest following Mass Haas @Mass_Haas, and/or Toby @YouKnowAndThat. They put out good Brewer content anyway, but posted updates on the status while the site was down as well.

 

There was also updates on the technical issues on the Facebook site I noticed.

[Pugger]

Yes, thanks Brian. This is the best Brewer message board around. I was going thru withdrawals while it was down.

[Mass Haas]

You can't kill Shea Vucinich.

 

He's back, baby!

 

Thank you, Brian the Automator.

[DHonks]

Everything better now? Hadn’t been able to reach the site for over a day.

[hawing]

Well, I can see and reply to your post, DHonks, so I'm hoping so.

The forum worked for me when I visited briefly at midday Tuesday. Earlier today, after Mass Haas alerted me, I was able to log in but not open any posts. I got word of that to Brian K and either he was able to bring about change or it returned on its own.

 

Fingers crossed...

[stalton]

Who forgot to pay the electric bill?

[Brian the Automator]

I'm going to try to get to the bottom of what happened. Be assured that it wasn't anything that we did on our end that caused the outage.

[Brian the Automator]

There was a migration to new DNS servers by our "main" host (the one that hosts our "main site" and email, and also the one that tells your browser what IP address "forum.brewerfan.net" resolves to). The migration should have been transparent to us, and we shouldn't have seen any downtime. From them: "It seems that migration has been done, but there was a post-migration issue on your website which caused the downtime." So, that's as specific as they got.

 

Whatever the case may be, we're back up now. And i'll probably begin exploring ways to move what we need from that host to our forum host or something more robust.

[Storm]

Thanks for all your hard work.

[hawing]

I kind of reflexively want to blame St. Louis.

[CheezWizHed]

I kind of reflexively want to blame St. Louis.

 

[sarcasm]St. Louis didn't social distance and our server got a COVID virus. But they can't say that because of HIPPA rules....[/sarcasm]

 

(And yes, that was me that said nearly the same thing on the Facebook page. )