The new cloud server

[Keith Clements]

There have been some issues with the new cloud server which I have been fixing over the past week.

Peter Pfister reported he could not get into the website. This eventually was traced to the firewall protecting the website blocking his IP address. I fixed this by putting his address in the whitelist. Why the Firewall did not like Peter I do not know as he is so loveable. But if this happens to you please let me know your IP ( by using whatismyip.com) Note the Firewall is very active in preventing abuse so might get it wrong sometimes or your device might be trying to do nasty things to the website or your IP address may have been used by a bad device sometime in the past.

This anti abuse system is also used on emails so you might find emails are blocked or have SPAM advice messages attached. The system only accepts mails from senders that it can check so if you are using a mail provider that does not have a good reputation it might not forward a mail from you.

The mail system decided on Friday it did not want to play. After a few days of intensive investigation the fix was relatively simple but why it was required is not fully understood. Mail is sent using two systems to give some resilience. One used to use the Godaddy mail system and this has been replaced by Gmail. The second uses another external provider, SendInBlue, which stopped working because the system could not find the SendInBlue server using the Domain Name Service provided by Gcloud in which our new website is housed. Why this is I have yet to find out but it may be due to the upgrade of the whole Internet to version 6. This is a MAJOR task for all as the whole infrastructure has to change, and has taken years.

Another issue was more difficult to fix and stopped jowett.net website working (but not jowett.org or jowettjupiter.com). After many many hours of experimentation it was found a service had not started. Once again I have no idea why, but will have to make sure it does not fail again. Jowett.net was showing as service unavailable during this time. During this experimentation the system was restarted several times so you may have noticed some issues.

If you have any issues or suggestions then please mail me (perhaps directly to the gmail account webmasterclubjowett'at'gmail.com ) note 'at' should be replaced by @

[AlecGatherer]

It is total witchcraft to me, but thanks for being on top of it.

[Keith Clements]

When I started with the Internet in the early 1990's it was simple compared to today. Now you spend twice as much time trying to stop people doing things than trying to do things people want. I often think that spells have been cast on the systems driving the website.

[Keith Clements]

I received notification this week that the free Gsuite service that I took out over 12 years ago is ending in May. At that time I had plans to move the website and club systems to Google and the cloud but have always been mistrustful of all corporates to lock you in AND THEN CHARGE THE EARTH.
So I resisted and kept all the services on easily movable platforms using open source software until this New Year when they moved to a Gcloud server which I set up in a ne Google Workspace account. This was done because the gcloud virtual machines offered a cheaper and better service than before for the now large website. The club treasurer now receives a monthly bill for this hosting service which is paid to Google.

But I have still resisted using the gcloud services that could have been used to perhaps simplify the maintenance of the website. This means that if they do start to charge too much the web services can be moved to another server, albeit now with more difficulty than when it was on Godaddy and my server at home. It has taken 4 months to move the systems into the Gcloud.

We could as an organisation use the Google Workspace for all our club business, rather than firing emails to our personal mailboxes (with its inherent security risks), and using separate spares inventory, shop inventory, register and membership systems. This would make managing the mail system a lot easier and with a bit of effort integrate all the JCS and JCC IT functions. But there may be a better and cheaper way. Whilst having your own system on your own PC may seem initially easier, you end up having to support your own application and then, when you move on, nobody else can use it. Your application and its data is likely to be prone to failure and risk of total loss.