FamilyNet International HQ Website News

Well - three days of intense work but I was able to migrate the web portals to the new server (with a minimum of problems). I am still looking for any residual after effects, but everything appears to be stable and funcioning normally. I haven't had time for anything else over the last three days - but this should have the web portals on a permanent stable platform.

10/14/09 - This web portal needs to change to a new server (yet again). The current server is not stable, and I am moving to a new server, with more memory. I have to complete the move by Saturday. 10/17/09 to avoid additional charges. I will post an update when the move is complete.
 

At about 8 PM EDT on Saturday evening (10/03/09) our servers experienced an outage which lasted about two hours. The outage was due to a heavy load that caused the applications to run out of memory. Attempts to do soft restarts and then power cycles (we are remote, the servers are Enterprise class servers located in a data center) did not work. (Note: this did NOT affect our free web hosting accounts, just our core ministry web portals - this web portal was affected).

I have the option to add memory, but due to financial constraints (we are only at 10% of our support) I have opted to change the dynamic (changes often and on the fly) real time updating of content to a static content (updates are done less frequently). This has appreciably eased the load on the servers, increasing in better response and no impairment.

This comes with a price

• Only one style is now available (you can't change the colors etc). The Select Style button will not work).
• You can no longer see how many users are online any more.
• The real time content (how many people have clicked on a link etc)
• Drop down select menus are no longer available.
• New News is available less frequently.

The good news is the static content will make the site friendly to more search engines.

I apologize for the outage and we will try and get back to the dynamic configuration when funds permit an upgrade.

I have completed the software upgrade.

I will be upgrading this software either this evening (Monday 07/20/09) or tomorrow (depending on how easy it goes - I have five installations to upgrade). There will be an outage of up to 30 minutes, during which time you can expect some strage things to happen. I will post an additional message when the upgrade is completed.

The spammers have figured out they could use the contact link on the details page of a link to send spam (in most cases adult spam) to the links on this web portal. To stop thtis practice we have implemented a  policy requiring anyone wishing to send a message to a link to be a registered user. We do not use ANY email addresses to send out newsletters, and the email addresses are not shared with anyone or added to any mailing lists. They ARE required when adding a link and/or when registering as a user on this portal. If you have received SPAM marked "A message from a user of Familyne" I apologize and these message should stop now since I manually approve all registered users.

This server experienced a "Over Bandwidth: error this afternoon. It was an error - we have moved on to a new server, and I am still trying to figure out the idiosyncracies of the it. I made a global change that reimplemented all of the lower bandwidth settings (this web portal uses substantial bandwidth). Unforthunately, the control panel did not show the lower settings. It took me a little while to figure out what was going on. Sorry for any inconvenience, and barring my stupidity the new server should be much more stable an environment for this web portal.

I will be moving this web portal to a new server today if everything goes as planned. There will be an outage (a couple of minutes total I hope) as I rebuild the databes and run the setup configuration files.