The Stovebolt Site Forums The Back Office News and Announcements Sorry for the outage

The technical issues were quite difficult to resolve, but most of them are resolved now. We apologize for the lengthy outage.

Please report any issues that you find directly to me at geek@stovebolt.com.

I'm liking what I see, so far.

What was the cause of the outage if I may ask? A forum upgrade went sideways?

We upgraded the forum last week. That went fine. This week, we upgraded to php 8.3 and that broke the forum completely. We had to sort through a ton of problems, and we gradually restored functionality. (We're still not completely there yet.) The last step was to replace the existing config file with a new one and then edit it to use the correct database.

Now we have to get back all the things that are still missing. (They're not really missing. They're just disabled by default.)

Don't apologize, Paul. We appreciate you doing what you do, and getting the site back up. I was going thru withdrawal.

I hate to tell you how many hours I spent on this. Saturday night I was up until 4:30 AM. Last night I was up until 1 AM. I enlisted the aid of our hosting company and UBB support, and neither one was any help. I finally threw up my hands today and set up a test instance. That's when I discovered that there was something wrong with the config file. So, I replaced it with a default one, but that means we have to recreate all the bells and whistles, so the work's not done yet.

I mentioned to Peggy that you were likely pulling your hair out. She said you didn't have much hair already.

I can understand how much work it was. Thanks.

PS an e-mail about a glitch is coming your way.

If you get this error
when posting or replying, delete all the stovebolt data from your browser. (Usually under Privacy in Settings). You'll be logged out. When you log back in, it should work properly.

Paul, Worked for me.

Paul, I just want to add my own great big thank you for all you do to set the ship back on course!!! I too was suffering some serious withdrawl - LOL!

Your efforts are very much appreciated!!!

I also want to thank you for all you do for us. It couldn’t have been easy these last few weeks trying to get the forum up to date. It must have been an “Oh [censored]” moment when it all crashed. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Thanks for the hard work and getting us back online. Know the task can be a difficult one.

Paul, so glad you got it figured out. We're all so lucky and grateful to have you.

Thank you for your perseverance.

John

Thanks to every one of you for the kind words.

Paul, I know just enough to know I don't know much about the War you just fought. Both my boys make their living in that world, one runs a group of software development engineers, he learned a long time ago that Dad really can't carry his side of the conversation about his work.

Thank You Sir!

RonR

OK. Gonna give you guys all the sordid details. When we upgraded the site to PHP 8.3.11, the first error message I got was UBB needs MSQLI to run. Which was odd because MSQIi was installed.(Otherwise, the current forum wouldn’t have been working.) On a hunch, I checked to see if there was a PHP 83-php-msqlnd module. There was, so I installed that and I no longer got that error message. This is even though we already had PHP8.3 mysqlnd installed.

The next problem encountered was both the forum and the admin panel were blank. Throwing 500 errors. (Those are generic "Uh, I don't know what to do with this command" errors.) On a hunch. I looked for other PHP8.3-php modules and installed those as well. That got the forum working, but the admin panel was still not working.

I kept working installing modules, and eventually, I got the admin panel working. I thought yay I’m done. Nope! Now that everything seemed to be working I thought I would post that I was done. But posting didn’t work. Neither did replying. Both throw 500 errors. Back to the drawing board.

Now the problem was, that I wasn’t getting any errors in any of the logs. So, where do I go from here?

After hours and hours and hours of trying to figure out what was wrong, I finally threw up my hands and asked for help. I got the hosting company involved. I got UBB Support involved. Neither one was any help. I was on my own. I even considered hiring a professional, and I actually contacted some.

Finally, in an act of desperation, I thought I wonder what would happen if I set up a test instance on our server. In other words, a clean install. Voila! It worked fine. That told me that the problem was obviously in the forum itself (the software I mean). So, on a hunch, I copied the configuration file to a backup file and then overwrote the configuration file with the one from the new install. That worked!

So, that told me that the problem was the configuration file. Once I got that done, everything appeared to be working except when you posted or replied to a message you got a blank screen. The post or reply worked. It was actually there, but you had a black screen. I knew that would be a real problem for our users, so I had to solve that before I could open the forum.


On a hunch, I deleted all of The Stovebolt data from my browser. That fixed that problem. Now I knew I could open the forum. But wait. Sticky posts and global announcements weren’t working.

It was then that I stumbled across an option in the control panel – enable debugging. I enabled that, and lo and behold errors were showing up on the screen. Now a thinking person would think, Why didn’t UBB Support tell me about that? That would’ve saved me a world of time when I had no errors in any logs and had no clue what was wrong. And the reason I wasn't seeing any errors in the logs is because the UBB Software traps them all and reports them through its debug feature. So, they'll never show up in the logs.

After posting to the UBB forum, I discovered that there was a flaw in the code for the sticky posts and global announcements. Once I applied the fix that fixed those as well.

So, the bottom line is I got no help from anyone and UBB Support didn’t even tell me about the debug feature which would’ve helped me greatly. But we’re finally back up and running on the new system with PHP 8.3.11 and all is good.

The really frustrating part for me is that the developers in the UBB forum kept telling me there was something wrong with the server, something wrong with the web server, something wrong with what I had done. They said repeatedly, that our software is a simple php script. If you have a properly configured server, it works. But all along the problem was with their software. When you do an upgrade, the upgrade “edits“ the configuration file, and apparently when it edited ours it screwed up.

I made sure to point these things out to the developers and tell them that I didn’t appreciate being told I was wrong and didn’t know what I was doing when all along the problem was with their software.

Anyway, lessons learned. I now have a file of notes regarding issues that I ran into so that I’ll be able to refer to them the next time we upgrade. And I know about the debugging feature, so I won’t be scrounging around in the dark the next time something happens. And something will happen because that’s the nature of software.

WOW, THANKS.

I’m guessing their first response was, “Try shutting down and rebooting first”… like, as if you hadn’t done that four times already.

I retired from a power utility and we’d install a new version of something, notice a key function no longer worked. They’d be like, “Oh yeah… we already heard about that. No worries… it will be corrected in the next release.” Huh?!

We got better… IT would set up a parallel instance, install the update and have employees test it exhaustively before committing it to the live system.

Thanks for what you do!
gld

In an ideal world, we would have a test instance that we could test updates on before going live. Alas, the cost is prohibitive, and the maintenance is as well.

Thanks for all of the hard work bald eagle.

Looks like it's all good now! Thanks for hard work.