All members, please read. Planned forum downtime.

[dbhost]

Our initial outage we had planned for the weekend went well, but not all of our ducks were fully in a row at the time. We need to perform an outage on the evening of 10/02/2012 starting at 6:00 P.M. and lasting until approximately 10:00 p.m. Central time.

At this time we will be performing the final migration of the forum to the new host. The system will be up and down during this time period. IF you make any posts, edits or any other changes to posts profiles or any other features of the site you have access to the possibility is high that your changes will be lost after the work is done. Please allow us the time to perform this task to bring us all up to speed, and insure everything is working as we would like it to.

We the staff at BT3Central / The SawDustZone appreciate your patience as we go through these changes in this transition period. We look forward to a long, and productive future with this entire community!

[dbhost]

Bump back to top. Everyone needs to be aware...

[greenacres2]

Tonight?? I guess i'll just have to take LOML to dinner for our anniversary since i won't be able to be here!!

earl

[Black wallnut]

Happy anniversary Earl!

[dbhost]

We are running a little bit long tonight. This post is a test.

[billwmeyer]

Looks like the test work.
Bill

[dbhost]

Test #2.

The site netcraft report shows we are now on Apache, no longer on Windows IIS...

did we pass?

[dbhost]

Okay the tests are complete, we are on the new server, and the original is no longer responding to web requests for the site.

Load has been quite low so far, but response time appears to be faster. We will see.

We are already aware of some missing data, that we are working on locating and restoring from the original server. Specifically the old articles section. If you have a copy of any of the original .pdf files, please contact a member of the staff, and arrange to email the file to us so we can include it (assuming we can't find it).

We also were not able to get the forum software to function properly under the multiple domain names (yet). At this time, please only use the www.bt3central.com address. We will notify you when www.sawdustzone.com, and www.sawdustzone.org are working properly with the software.

Please bear with us as we go through these transition pains. We appreciate your continued support, and patience with us as we grow into the future, and look forward to a bright tommorrow.

[Black wallnut]

It seems like there is a DNS issue that should resolve within 48 hours. If you have the issue you'll not be reading this post.

[LCHIEN]

Congratulations! Good work, Dave.

[Bill in Buena Park]

Mark,
Regarding this DNS issue - is this what causes me to have to access the site via "www.sawdustzone.com" and the old "www.bt3central.com" gives a PLESK error?

[Black wallnut]

I believe so Bill.

[gerti]

Apropos DNS: www.bt3central.com works, but bt3central.com (no www) does not (used to work before).

[dbhost]

An update from the bt3central tech staff.

For those that are not able to pull up bt3central without the www, bt3central.com without the www is working from here. What errors are you getting? Specific error messages will help in diagnosing the problem.

I would like to apologize about how long it is taking for the DNS update replication. This is a known issue that can, and often does happen when transferring one static DNS entry for another, especially when switching hosts.

If you hear from other members that are having trouble logging in, please let them know the following...

#1. Verify that they have purged their browser cache. I found with my own browsers, on Windows at least, the name resolution was actually cached in the browser. This happened with Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Google Chrome.

#2. Verify that their DNS has been updated. From a command prompt they need to verify the DNS by using the "nslookup" command, so they would type at the command line "nslookup www.bt3central.com" without the quotes. The IP address returned should have 61 as the last 2 digits. If it does not, their DNS resolver hasn't updated yet. It will, it's just taking some time.

#3. If neither of these approaches work, please PM either myself, or tcottle, and preferrably both, with their contact information, we will try to work with them to resolve the issue.

As far as the issue with the new domain / host names goes, I am about to open a new thread on that so that we do not overrun this thread.