Forum status ? Encourage the admin's !

[phildc]

A lot of problems (date errors, no site available at all, 'could not connect to d.b.' msg,..) for the last 3 or 4 weeks, resulting in almost no activity, Jurgen N. connected all the time, ...

What's happening? Is it the end of this nice forum?
Let's write our messages of encouragement to the forum administrators here.

Please, go on with the good job !

Phil.

[shaul_eiz]

I totally agree with Phil. This has been a useful and professional forum until not very long ago, but technical problems seem to be taking it down.
FMS is still the best free simulator with thousands of users. Let's hope the forum recovers soon.
Shaul

[Michael_Moeller]

I am personally very unhappy with the current situation as well. The problem is that the whole FMS website is hostet on the student webserver of the ETH Zurich. There have been many techincal problems with the MySQL server during the last weeks. And usually I can only hope that the support will fix it fast. If the webserver will not get stable during the next weeks I will be looking for another host. Overall the hosting on the ETH server has been very good during the last years, so I still hope that this is a temporary problem.

That means there is no intention to close down the forum or website. And beside this I personally hope that the development on the new source base will lead to a new FMS release one day. At the moment its far from complete but I have not given up hope to be able to add the missing parts.

Michael Möller

[shaul_eiz]

Dear Michael,
I'm really happy with this very quick reply. I would like to encourage you. You are doing a wonderful job and helping thousands of people around the world to get closer to this hobby while saving a lot of money.
I monitor this forum on a daily basis and try to answer questions as much as I can. Do keep up with the excellent work you've been doing
Shaul

[phildc]

Ok, thanks for the reply, Michael, this makes the things more clear. Let's hope that this temporary unstability will be fixed soon.
And thanks for developing a new version!

Phil.

[Michael_Moeller]

I have just edited the database once more manually and hope to have removed the last glitches from the date errors (Jurgen N. is now logged out).

Michael Möller

[Jürgen N.]

Could it be that I am the culprit?
I follow half a dozen forums. I never log out each time explicitly.
But if it is really necessary here, at your service, Sir!
Kind regards
Juergen

[phildc]

Don't worry, Juergen, must be a system problem. I never log out, too.

Phil.

[Michael_Moeller]

No Jürgen it was an error in the database, you don't need to log out yourself. Some time ago someone messed up the server system time. And the sessions started back then (in the future time) never ended. But it is fixed now I hope (deleted all sessions).

Michael Möller

[phildc]

Large down times occured again, mostly the week-ends. Any idea why the forum data base is (again) so vulnerable and actions to restore the availability of our beloved forum?

Phil.

[Michael_Moeller]

As mentioned above the FMS website is hosted on the student webhost servers of the ETH Zurich, called "n.ethz.ch". Seperated from this, the ETH MySQL server is used to store the data of this forum. During the last days there have been many attempts to login with false passwords from the n.ethz.ch domain. And usually the MySQL server just blocks the complete n.ethz.ch domain after a certain amount of failed logins (for safety). The support said they try to fix this for the furture. Usually at weekends there hasn't been anyone to unblock the n.ethz.ch domain manually for MySQL access. That's where the down times come from.

Well, I guess that the student webhost hasn't got very high priority for support. And that there are many problems due to the large number of students using it. Atm it looks like they have solved the problems once. Most of these problems seem to have come from the new MySQL server that has been installed.

Michael

[phildc]

Ok, Michael, thanks for the explanations. I understand there is nothing to do on your side, just hope the guys find a suitable protection, without needing to close.
Regards,
Philippe.