VERY IMPORTANT

[Forumadmin]

THOSE who have been on JowettTalk since 20:00 hrs last night may have noticed that the attachments were not showing up in the posts.
This was because GODaddy who host the website decided to move the site to a new server and then decided there was too much stuff on it and I had to remove it. NO DISCUSSION, even though it was within the limits of the package they sold me.
The website has been backed up frequently to the companion website jowett.club running on a server at home from which you are now reading this.
The eagle eyed of you will notice a change to the domain name to jowett.club
Some things may not yet work so please let me know what is not by sending me the offending URL and description of the issue.
Of course the response is slower but please let me know if it is intolerable. I am in the process of moving everything to the Google Cloud but needless to say I have to learn a lot very quickly and I have had a few abortive attempts.

This is a list of what I have found and will update it when they are fixed.

One post by Austin7 from last night has been lost. He was complalning about not finding things and wanted a 1930 engine diagram!

The link in the address bar to jowett.club gives a FORBIDDEN message. This is by design you can still go to jowett.net wher everything apart from JowettTalk should work.

Google and Facebook sign on

ARCHIve search. Works via Member Services not via JowettTalk.

Video Library

[Keith Clements]

The mail from JowettTalk is not being sent so email messaging, system notifications and registration emails are not working.

[Keith Clements]

Hi All ,
After a week of learning very quickly how to use virtual machines in the cloud, and a few abortive attempts , I think I now have a working forum where the email seems to work. However, since there has been some activity on and new users to the forum on jowett.club today, I have decided not to switch over to the new server in the cloud, since I have a couple of days hosting a Jowett technical day and going to rugby, and if anything needs attention I will not be available.
So you will have to put up with the slower response for a little longer.

I would like to do a bit more testing and tighten up the security which means even more testing. I may even move jowett.org and the video archive and document archive over as well. The modular nature of the website makes maintenance easier, although some of you complain that it is complex, it is better than having no web facilities! As I have said before, each part of the website uses different software which is updated sporadically by many sources. This latest update for the forum used a complete stack that is maintained by one group, so all I have to do is carefully integrate the customized bits for JowettTalk into each release of this stack about every 6 months. Much easier than trying to choose when the 10 bits of underlying software demand me to do the update on all of them!

[Forumadmin]

The jowett.club server database system had an issue overnight and had to be restarted this morning. Please advise if youfind anything wrong with JowettTalk.

[Keith Clements]

Hi all
I have moved the websites to their new home in the clouds.
You may have issues because your devices may still be pointing to the old IP address.
You should be able to clear this either by closing your browser or restarting your machine or clearing the cache in your browser.
However your previous favourites, bookmarks, desktop icons and aliases should all still work once your machine has sorted it out.

Please contact me, if you have issues.

Note that this has been a complex move done in stages by---
1. Learning about the various types of cloud offerings and choosing Google.
2. Learning about Gcloud Compute engines and choosing a configuration.
3. Learning about packages that simplify (supposedly) the implementation and choosing Bitnami phpbb as a base.
4. Transferring the 80 GB of data to the cloud from my desktop (after a few abortive attempts) and trying to integrate Google Cloud Storage.
5. Testing implementation, operation and security on my other Gcloud instance of the many various facilities that make up the website services including multi domain web hosting, secure certificates for each, integration into the BItnami stack, outgoing mail support as well as the operating system, database and underlying software.
6. Redirecting the jowettjupiter.com domain to point to the new host and testing the base website, JowettTalk and Member Services on this domain.
7. Testing out the move of jowett.org and figuring out how to apply multi domain security certificates.
8. Switching over the jowett.net domain to the new host and changing the config from jowettjupiter.com and testing it all out.
9. Redirecting some of the possible landing spots in the old host websites with an advisory message to clear their browser and device cache.
10. Wait for any issues users find

I still have to check out and then move the Search Archive service running in jowett.club on the laptop, but I hope you are now stunned by the fast response of the video archive.

In my investigations I discovered that the previous hosting company, Godaddy, had deleted some of the intrusion detection software I had installed without informing me!!!! This is now reinstated on the new virtual machine in the cloud.

This is in addition to Godaddy moving the site to a supposedly faster server without informing me beforehand and then saying they could not run the site and giving me 4 days to move it. This is all without breaching their T&Cs on their so called 'Ultimate' package.

I was already thinking of moving to the cloud which provides much better headroom and an easy snapshot facility for back-up. I will however still maintain a backup at home as Google has been known to drop facilities and change their T&Cs. Hopefully there will be a reduction in the maintenance of the services as they will be under one roof and not subject to changes by the hosting company on the underlying platform. This should give me more time to update and improve the existing services and provide new ones.

First on the list is the mail service and then will come the search service which is still hosted on the jowett.club website running on the laptop.

I still have to find an alternative incoming email support service that is provided by Godaddy. This service provides mailboxes for club officers.

[Nick Webster]

I note that jowett.net and jowett.club are not in sync and different posts have appeared on each.

Nick

[Keith Clements]

Hum. Access to jowett.club JT should not have been possible after swap. However, your browser may have cached some content. I will investigate.

I found three posts that took place on jowett.club after the database was saved so I have transferred to jowett.net JowettTalk

[Keith Clements]

Alf reported jowett.net was down today. Anyone else have the same problem? When I checked it was up and working. I need to know as be are on a new cloud based service.

[Nick Webster]

Yes, I couldn't get the site to load afternoon / evening.

Nick.

[Keith Clements]

Thanks. This is worrying. Please email me if this happens again.

[Keith Clements]

I have set up a website monitor which alegedly checks the site is working from numerous places around the world every 5 minutes. So we will see what happens. It emails me when it detects a failure, but please email me if you have such an issue. I had the first day off from the website yesterday, the first in a month, so perhaps it knew I was not watching!

[Forumadmin]

The website monitor is showing occasional short interruptions of less than 5 minutes and today one of about 20 minutes of service. But that does not mean that the server is not accessible. As yet I have not been able to test my own access when I get the email telling me the service is in error. So any reports from you would help, giving day, time and length of outage.

The logs on the server do not show anything as far as I can see, so I am still trying to find out what the problem may be or if there really is a problem with the new hosting service.

There are many ways to provide a resilient service but they cost money, so I am not prepared to spend more if it is not necessary.

[Forumadmin]

The system went very slow whilst I was using it so I was able to discover what might have been causing it and found an operating system update script was failing. Note this was in the Bitnami package which supposed to have been tested, not something I had written. So hopefully that should fix it. I also added some more memory to the compute instance to make it faster.
Please let me know of any issues either by email or via this topic.

[Keith Clements]

I am currently investigating a problem with adding your own notes to items in the video library. This seems to have stopped working since the move.
Not serious, but annoying.
There are also some errors being reported by the security logs when posting which does not seem to interrupt the post but once again is annoying. There are even stricter security rules being enforced and there is a battle between the security team and the phpbb writers of the forum on what is good practice.
Please report ANY issues you have.
Changing software and versions of software always generates new bugs, so the more testing you do and feedback any issues the better.

[Keith Clements]

The problem with adding NOTES to a video item in the video library is now fixed. The system also kept a log of all changes and after checking I can tell you that none of your notes have been lost.

By taking notes when watching the video and then sharing them by clicking the ADD NOTES button for the video you have just watched you will enhance our history and bring the videos to life!

Just add text after any that might be there already.