Admin

Crop

needle

3 months into 2011 and nobody posts here. Seems like the warnings are finally starting to work...

Should be gone now for all VIP/Platinum members.

2 main reasons why these areas were closed down;

1. New members withno or few posts being able to create ads and sell stuff. Several members have ended up with problems

2. Very few people actually followed up on their donation promise. We have a lot of honest sellers who did of course make the donation, but considering the amount of ads/sales going on here, the donations were minimal, to say the least. Most of the time when we tried contacting the sellers, they claimed the watch had been sold on a different forum, although the rules cleary states that the watch was only allowed to be listed for sale here.

I am looking into alternative solutions

We have just installed a massive update of our payment module. As I have posted about before, we have been having a lot of problems with this. The updates are not any "visual" updates, but mostly bug-fixes and other stuff. The reason I am posting about this is that the update will most likely affect a lot of members who have been a VIP/Platinum and who now notice that they are not. The reason for this is that this update also required a big database update. Because of this, the update automatically has downgraded all members who did not have a valid product and/or payment schedule in their profile. This basically means that all memberships has been corrected to their "correct" status. When I say correct, I mean that all members who have not renewed their memberships, but were not downgraded because of an error in our payment system is now a regular member again, as they should be.

Unfortunately, this will also affect some members who should not be downgraded. Because of previous errors in our payment system, there are members who doesn't have an active payment on profile, even though they have paid their fees. An automate system does of course not take this into consideration, so there might be valid VIP/Platinum members who have been downgraded. There are also members who have been upgraded as a prize or by the admin team for various reason. These members will most likely also show up as regular members.

If you notice that you no longer are a VIP/Platinum member, please do the following;

1. Check the status of your membership and if your membership has expired. Use the "Client area" to do this. This is accessible through the drop-down menu in the top right corner (Client Area -> Purchases) or you can click here: http://www.rwgforum.com/index.php?app=nexus&module=clients&section=purchases

2. If you see only expired items, this means that all your purchases have expired and you need to upgrade again. You can do this in our store: http://www.rwgforum.com/store

If you see only expired products, but you are sure that you have paid, send me a PM with your Paypal-address and I will look into it as soon as possible.

3. If you don't see any products, but you know you have purchased an upgrade, please send me a PM with your PayPal-address and I will look into it as soon as possible.

4. If you don't see any products, but you have been upgraded by the admin team as part of a prize or other reason, please contact the team member who originally upgraded you or PM me with info about how, why and when you were upgraded.

I am terrible sorry for the inconvenience this will cause some of our members, but unfortunately this had to be done to get our system working as it is supposed to.

Looking through some of my favorite videos on YouTube and then the video below showed up. Not the best music, so I am having a hard time figuring out why I put it among my favorites

Due to continuous abuse of the auction + fundraiser sales forum (Members never donating after selling items, members posting items on several forums, etc.) we have decided to close the auction sales area. It will no longer be possible to post new threads in the forum and all ongoing auctions are to be treated as closed by the admin. This means that all bids placed are no longer valid.

We are sorry for the inconvenience and will hopefully be able to find a better solution for sales like this in the future.

Still the same for me, I'm afraid.

Thanks for checking.

Val.

Try again now. You will probably get some error messages on top of the page, but you should be able to select payment method and then go through the checkout process.

Should be good now. Let me know if it's the same

I just wanted to make a donation. Has the process changed? I'm asked to give detailed billing information now whereas last time I got simply redirected to PP.

This might scare of potential donors? It did scare of me.

Any help?

Valerian

Hmm...I just installed an update to the "store" software, so I'll have to look into this.

Whew.... thought I was banned!

Well, that can always be fixed

Hi guys

Sorry for the unexpected downtime.

I am working on some changes for the forum and yesterday I was installing a new caching software on our webserver. Apparently this didn't go as planned, so the forum has been offline for some time. This has now been fixed. My apologies for any inconvenience caused to our members.

I say "burn him at the stake".

Our...ehm..."tech crew" is on their way for a little "bat"....oh, sorry..."chat"....I meant "chat"!!

Hello Admin,

The log I posted is directly out from my mail server. The DNS name problem is now corrected :

Feb 20 23:06:34 s1 postfix/smtpd[1643]: warning: 95.168.161.220: hostname alpha.rwgforum.com verification failed: Name or service not known

Feb 20 23:06:34 s1 postfix/smtpd[1643]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[95.168.161.220]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [95.168.161.220]; from=<out@rwgforum.com> to=<romain@XXX.fr> proto=ESMTP helo=<alpha.rwg.cc>

But another DNS issue here. I don't see why the "helo" sent from your server is alpha.rwg.cc, when my mail server try to resolve alpha.rwgforum.com to your IP. Routing alpha.rwgforum.com to 95.168.161.220 will probably be a good idea.

As you probably know, DNS propagation can take anything from 10 second up to 72 hours (and more), so as soon as the correct DNS data is loaded for you, the problem will be solved

The address I have changed to is out@rwgofurm.com and not ou@rwg.com, as you say in your post. Don't know where you get this from, as we don't own and/or control rwg.com. Most likely reason you are getting the error above is that I deleted the DNS for our hostname, so it was missing for a short while.

For those of you interested; the reason we have changed our e-mail setup and the reason some of your mail might end up in your spam-filters is that our domain/IP has for some reason been added to a lot of spam-blacklists(RBLS) that many providers validate e-mails against and this is not something we want.

Been listening to the new album from Norwegian band Eva & The Heartmaker all day...loving it...

Album on spotify:

Album on Wimp: http://wimp.no/album/5595761

A big, big thank you to all of you who have made a donation. You are making things a lot easier for us (well, me, since I am the one paying the bills) Your support is highly appreciated!!

We've been having some problems with the topics views ever since the forum went offline. This has now been fixed, so the topic views are once again updated every 3 hours.

Some pics

Always great to see some familiar faces

Hi guys

Sorry for the downtime, but I had to take the servers down for some emergency maintenance and didn't have time for any notifications.

Thanks for all the hard work!

Are you going to put in a claim @ the datacenter?

Seems they are responsible?

Well, the datacenter has been very helpful through this entire event and have made several machines available for me, both windows and linux to attempt to get data back from the disks. They are still investigating what went wrong and the fire has closed down almost 400 servers that was in the same room, as our rack. Everything has been moved to a new room, including our new servers. The only rack that was affected was ours and the routines and equipment did indeed work, but I know by experience that there are several different fire prevention systems out there and I'm not sure if our current datacenter is using one of those that can detect components from smoldering components, as this will be the first sign of something wrong, before smoke and/or flames appear and all "regular" systems detect these things. I will wait for their final report before deciding what to do, but I don't think they could have done anything different and I don't think we are entitled to a big claim anyway. We'll see..

Damn i lost a conversation i was having with KB in my messages, will we be able to get old PM back???

No. All content that can be restored has been restored.

OK. I have some stuff that is running in the background that I need to wait for, so here are some more details;

When the site went offline Friday, I was going to contact the datacenter where our servers are located, but they beat me to it and contacted me (which is not good, because either I owe them money or there is something VERY wrong somewhere) Well, I knew I did not owe them any money, so this had to be bad news and it was; There had been a fire in the rack where our servers were located. The fire was quickly put out, but not quick enough.

Before I continue, here is a little background info for you guys. We run separate web and database servers to speed things up a bit. My regular setup is at least 3 hard drives per server; 2 drives in a RAID1 setup (this will create identical content on 2 disks, so that if one fails, it can easily be replaced and all content is still available on disk 2 and when a new disk is inserted, all content is synced to both disks again) The 3rd disk is used for our nightly backups. All content is then archived (this is why the servers are so unresponsive sometimes. It takes a bit of computing power to put all our content into an archive) and stored on the 3rd disk. On top of this, I also rsync the archived backups on disk 3 to a separate, off site location.

OK, so we had a fire in the datacenter and lost all of our servers. "No biggie. I've got backups" Well, unfortunately all of our disks were somehow damaged, and it was simply not possible to get any content from any of the disks. Again..."No biggie. I've got backups". And this is where the "fun" starts. (I seriously thought everything was lost forever when the next thing happened). When I started to restore the latest backups, NONE of them worked. Not sure why, but all backups failed file checks and the archives were corrupt. So basically that means I had no backups left. Bad luck like this should not be possible.....A backup setup like this is usually bulletproof...Our techs at the datacenter had never heard of anything like this!

But then Lady Fortuna smiled to me; On Wednesday I downloaded one of the main backups from our server to get a couple of files from it and it was still on my home computer. YAY! So to be on the safe side, I made several copies of this file and started to upload it. Now, this file was about 52GB in size (Every daily backup file is this big!) and I can only tell you that it takes a loooong time to upload such a file on a 5MB outbound connection. After starting the restoration this morning, my time, and running into a few minor problems with the database, everything was once again working again.

All content posted since Tuesday is gone and this also goes for PM's and any other "stuff" that you have managed to put on our server. So if you sent me a PM and I did not fix it, PM me again. If you posted something funny, interesting, etc, post it again

Oh, and if you upgraded your membership these days, PM me or e-mail me at admin@rwg.cc to get the upgrade applied to your account again. Remember to include your PP-address or transaction number in your PM/email.