Daylight saving

[Keith Clements]

The authorisation system hit a problem this morning with us moving out of daylight savings time.
I have overcome it, but you may see the times out by an hour.
Hopefully it has not affected anything else. But if you notice PLEASE tell me.

Also another reminder that you may get a General Error due to lack of resources. Please just click your browser refresh and the page should reload.

[Srenner]

Get the General Error message.

[Keith Clements]

Yes the General Error message is getting more frequent. All computer systems are struggling with the pandemic as well.

I was in panic yesterday as users, including me, could not get into the Member Services system. I quickly tracked it down to the DST issue.

https://www.vertabelo.com/blog/the-prop ... -in-mysql/
Gives you an idea of what caused it!
So I am now reading all about it and trying to fix. My brain hurts.
The database stores time in different ways and gives the stored time back to the program in different ways. The server that runs the data base also has a different way of processing time depending on whether it is using local or universal time. Similarly the programming system has different ways of dealing with time, as does the program that I or others have written. Then there is the user's device, probably sitting in a different timezone! I was trying to display times based on the UK time but am now going to have to rethink it.
What happened yesterday is that time in the UK moved forward an hour meaning that times between 02:00 and 03:00 in the Europe/London timezone did not exist. So, if someone signed on at 01:59 their session had expired 1 minute later because time jumped on an hour. This persisted as the timezones between program and database had jumped an hour apart.
The simplest solution is to deal with everything in Universal time but that is not user friendly. My dirty solution was to give everybody an extra hour in bed and not use UK time. But now working on a better solution.

[Keith Clements]

There has been a large update to the MemberServices which you might notice as a result of the DST issue. Please contact me if you notice ANY issue.
I spent a couple of weeks learning all about time (not from Stephen Hawking), learning a bit more about MySQL, PHP and JAVA in order to fix it.
The system now runs in Universal Time Coordinated which is GMT even though the server and MYSQL run in a different timezone. All log entries and history entries are now in GMT.
But I have also added a clever bit of script which tries to find out the timezone in which your device is running . It will tell you what it found when you activate a session and times will be displayed to you in, hopefully, your local time. Please contact me if that is not the case.

[Keith Clements]

Philip Dingle noticed that there were a consistent number of users on line. So I investigated and found they were many persistent users with IP ddresses in China. I have now banned a few ranges of IP addresses and the problem is fixed, perhaps only temporarily!
This should also reduce the General Error which we have all been seeing as they were overloading the database.

Thanks Philip.


Philip also noticed this.

An issue that I have lived with for many months, but which is likely not
of your doing, is that I have to log-in twice before it accepts it as me.
This is with Safari on my iMac, but it works normally [one log-in] when
accessing JT on FireFox. It wasn't always like this with Safari, so
perhaps it coincided with an OS upgrade.

Please let me know if anyone else has had this issue.