Server issues

As you undoubtedly noticed, we have been experiencing some issues lately. We tried our best tracking things down, and updated quite a bit of our back-end software, but despite all best efforts, the site remained unstable.

We just received word from our host that the most likely culprit is a corruption of the VPS itself, which would explain why this was a particularly tough nut to crack. There were no error logs, and things went down quite unexpectedly (making troubleshooting frustrating for everyone involved).

However, we're happy to know that the origin of the issue has been (most likely) pin-pointed, and to address it, our VPS will be moved to a different system. This might mean some downtime again, but at least this time it will be expected down-time :)

As always, we apologize for the inconvenience.

 

Obviously moving to the new server did not address the issues. I'll move EP back to its home server tomorrow, and see if I can figure out what specifically is creating the issues :(

 

I switched EP over to a new server during the weekend, but that did not seem to work. We switched back to the old one now, and I'll further try to isolate the issue.

The frustrating thing is that it just goes down, without any upfront warning or error message. Our host has been trying to help us figure out where the issue is, but they (and they know Linux inside out) also were not able to pinpoint a root cause.

My next step is to isolate the wiki files and functionality from the main EP Forums, which is why I'll be switching the wiki into edit mode, and moving it to its own server to see if that stabilizes the forums at least.

I realize it's frustrating to everyone, but probably more so to me as the technically responsible. We (the host and I) have pretty much no solid leads to work with, which greatly complicates our ability to figure out exactly what piece of the site is causing the issue. We will find it, though, and when we do, we'll smash it with a big bad banhammer.

 

I do believe Facebook changed something in their development settings recently, though with the server issues, I've not had time to check that out. I'll investigate :)

 

Can you explain more what you mean? I'm not sure I understand (though I think you said the problem no longer exists now).

We think we might have tracked down the source of the problem, which resulted in EP going back to normal over the last few days. We're not 100% certain yet, notr can we really explain it, but heck, we'll take it as a good sign.

 

I am guessing that the times you were able to connect from the Internet cafe coincided with the server being up. The server has been stabilized now, though, so that part should work.

As for the latest issue, we moved the forums down from www.entropiaplanets.com/forums to www.entropiaplanets.com late 2012. Older bookmarks might still be affected by this, though I can try and see if I can come up with a way to have it redirect you to the new homepage instead.