Biopowered - vegetable oil and biodiesel forum

General => Chatter => Topic started by: greasemonkey on March 10, 2017, 05:32:49 PM

Title: Oh, your back.
Post by: greasemonkey on March 10, 2017, 05:32:49 PM
Where'd ya go? 8)
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: Julian on March 10, 2017, 06:49:52 PM
Tony .... WHAT A STAR!

If we had Reputation points on here I'd be clicking that button like crazy, well done mate.

Any idea what the issue was with Ecohosting?
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: Tony on March 10, 2017, 07:50:56 PM
No idea, just set it all up on my little machine at home, seems quite happy forumwise.  Wiki is grumbling about some issue with the auth bridge which will require me re-learning how classes work in PHP.  And possibly upgrading the mediawiki installation to something a little more modern.

No sign of massive traffic overloads at the moment.  If I see any, the firewall will have something to say about it :)
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: Tony on March 10, 2017, 07:57:43 PM
Curiously, for me, only the index page doesn't work, all the other pages do, for example:

http://www.biopowered.co.uk/wiki/Casting_a_venturi

I can see that fine.
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: photoman290 on March 10, 2017, 07:59:31 PM
missed yea well done tony.
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: Julian on March 10, 2017, 08:14:26 PM
Curiously, for me, only the index page doesn't work, all the other pages do, for example:

http://www.biopowered.co.uk/wiki/Casting_a_venturi

I can see that fine.

How weird, you're right, all pages are accessible via the Categories button on the wiki menu.  I wonder if it was like that before?

The index page was an addon to automatically index the wiki if I remember correctly.
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: Tony on March 10, 2017, 08:16:30 PM
Curiously, for me, only the index page doesn't work, all the other pages do, for example:

http://www.biopowered.co.uk/wiki/Casting_a_venturi

I can see that fine.

How weird, you're right, all pages are accessible via the Categories button on the wiki menu.  I wonder if it was like that before?

The index page was an addon to automatically index the wiki if I remember correctly.

Ah yes, I'd forgotten about that - very good point.  Maybe related.

Edit: This was it - https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:NiceCategoryList2
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: dgs on March 10, 2017, 08:19:00 PM
Couldn't believe my eyes, Well done Tony and all who have got the machine working again.
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: Julian on March 10, 2017, 08:29:14 PM
Curiously, for me, only the index page doesn't work, all the other pages do, for example:

http://www.biopowered.co.uk/wiki/Casting_a_venturi

I can see that fine.

How weird, you're right, all pages are accessible via the Categories button on the wiki menu.  I wonder if it was like that before?

The index page was an addon to automatically index the wiki if I remember correctly.

Ah yes, I'd forgotten about that - very good point.  Maybe related.

Edit: This was it - https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:NiceCategoryList2

I think that was it.  Really good addon.

If it's possible to retain it, it saves a hell of a lot of work manually indexing pages.

Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: 1958steveflying on March 10, 2017, 09:16:08 PM
Well done to whoever got it back up and running, Amazing.
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: Dickjotec on March 11, 2017, 08:51:53 AM
Well done. Glad to have you back
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: knighty on March 11, 2017, 08:55:05 AM
nice job :-)


got quite a surprise when I checked here not expecting the page to load.... and then it did :-o
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: Chug on March 11, 2017, 10:13:18 AM
Thanks for your efforts Tony, especially appreciated when we know you have your work schedule full with your new home . 8)
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: Head Womble on March 11, 2017, 01:02:01 PM
Good work lads, well done.
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: Jamesrl on March 11, 2017, 05:26:32 PM
Nice to see the forum back.

I decided not to tell how to fix it, well you'll never learn nuffin' ifn I keep tellin ya how to do fings.
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: K.H on March 11, 2017, 05:59:15 PM
Nice one Tony & Julian
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: Julian on March 11, 2017, 08:02:37 PM
Nice one Tony & Julian

Julian did nothing except upset the nice man at Ecohosting ... a task achieved with both ease and speed!
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: Tony on March 11, 2017, 10:53:49 PM
We should stop paying them... did we pay 12 months up front?  I'm not even sure when the renewal date was supposed to be.

I'm somewhat dumbfounded that it's easier to host it from a machine at home than on a professional hosting site.  I haven't had to change anything - it just works.  I can't help but feel that they had a problem with their mysql database server and were blaming it on excess traffic - but from what Julian said of the logs, the accesses weren't exactly back to back fast - so why the problem?
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: Julian on March 12, 2017, 12:20:06 AM
We should stop paying them... did we pay 12 months up front?  I'm not even sure when the renewal date was supposed to be.

I'm somewhat dumbfounded that it's easier to host it from a machine at home than on a professional hosting site.  I haven't had to change anything - it just works.  I can't help but feel that they had a problem with their mysql database server and were blaming it on excess traffic - but from what Julian said of the logs, the accesses weren't exactly back to back fast - so why the problem?

Didn't you pay for the Ecohost web space not too long ago?  I guess you, or someone, could go on using the space until the next renewal.  We could try asking for a refund ... although I rather suspect I know what their answer will be.

There will be some small print somewhere within a multi page terms and conditions that says sod off in legal jargon!

One thing that did stand out when I was looking through the logs was that Bing appeared to be making frequent requests for really obscure pages.  It may be worth banning them in the robots.txt file if it becomes an issue.  I did have a look at that file after Ecohosting said they had banned all SEs except Google, but I couldn't their addition (unless they removed all their modifications before giving us the final chop).



Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: Julian on March 13, 2017, 11:21:58 AM
And now the wiki front page is visible ... blinding work Tony!
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: Tony on March 13, 2017, 12:59:44 PM
It just started working on its own, I can't take credit for that!  (Maybe some cache timed out, or someone editted and saved the page?  Dunno - but I'm glad it's OK again)

Wiki pages should be edittable via the auth bridge too.

I'm sure there will be other bits broken, like uploading images for the wiki, or avatars for the forum.  Just have to fix them when we find them.
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: Julian on March 13, 2017, 04:41:51 PM
Can you log into the wiki?  When I try it's the same as before.
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: Tony on March 13, 2017, 04:52:16 PM
Oh, that's not right.  If I log out of the forum I stay logged in on the wiki.  It should all match up.

Also, e-mail notifications don't seem to be working.  That might be a problem, I think virgin block outbound e-mail by default.  So no verifying accounts possible (IE new users can't register, unless we disable the requirement to verify e-mail addresses - what a mess).
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: Tony on March 13, 2017, 04:54:36 PM
Yes, that's a problem all right:

http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Networking-and-wireless/Super-Hub-3-bans-port-forwarding-for-SMTP-port-25/td-p/3056341

And even if it could be un-banned, one user points out that many mail servers will disallow mail delivery from blocks of dynamic IP addresses such as the one I'm using.
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: Julian on March 13, 2017, 07:40:57 PM
Are you talking about the "welcome" email?

We don't get that many genuine newcomers, so we could send the welcome email manually?
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: Tony on March 13, 2017, 11:28:46 PM
It's the "click here to verify your account" one which we can't do manually.  (EDIT: well, we can manually verify accounts, but then would have to e-mail the registrant from our personal e-mail to say "come on in")
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: julesandtash on March 15, 2017, 09:05:21 PM
Is there some way you could operate on a vpn? That way Virginia can't tell what traffic you are sending / receiving and you would have a static IP (albeit one provided by the VPN server?
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: Tony on March 15, 2017, 10:07:51 PM
Sure, if we could find a willing VPN endpoint/gateway.
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: Julian on March 17, 2017, 12:39:53 PM
Is it possible to set up the registration process without using that email facility ... we manually vet applicants anyway?
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: Tony on March 17, 2017, 04:36:11 PM
Yes I think it is. :)
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: GedsJeep on March 17, 2017, 10:58:50 PM
you let me in.......
Title: Re: Oh, your back.
Post by: Julian on March 18, 2017, 12:44:35 AM
Admin were obviously having a bad day!