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Kalmbach IT at it again 10/10/18

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Kalmbach IT at it again 10/10/18
Posted by BaltACD on Wednesday, October 10, 2018 10:35 AM

Not able to get anything 'Trains' to display from 0700-1130 ET.

Never too old to have a happy childhood!

              

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Posted by Harrison on Wednesday, October 10, 2018 10:42 AM

BaltACD

Not able to get anything 'Trains' to display from 0700-1130 ET.

 

Yup, me to. MR and MRVP where also down.

Harrison

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Posted by SD70Dude on Wednesday, October 10, 2018 11:14 AM

BaltACD

Not able to get anything 'Trains' to display from 0700-1130 ET.

It was like that at around 2300 Mountain too.  

At least everything's back now.

Greetings from Alberta

-an Articulate Malcontent

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Posted by erikem on Wednesday, October 10, 2018 10:08 PM

I noticed the problem while perusing the forums last night when the website stopped responding, still down ~7:45AM PDT, but back to normal about noon.

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Posted by Deggesty on Thursday, October 11, 2018 10:45 AM

I realized another difficulty this morning. Usually my mailbox is full of new posts when I come on line in the morning. This morning, there were no new posts from Kalmbach--and when I opened this forum I found many, It is possible to ask for unread posts on a forum--and I have found several new ones, and I asked to subscibe to each of the threads that has new posts.

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Posted by Semper Vaporo on Thursday, October 11, 2018 11:33 AM

Hey... sometimes hardware breaks.  Sometimes new software needs to be installed (even if not the actual forum software, but the operating system or even some other bit of software used on the same system, such as drivers for a new piece of hardware) and the "update" has a flaw that was not detected in the testing done before release.  Even a backhoe has been known to knock out a connection and shut things down.

It is possilbe that something got really hosed and data was lost and it can take a while to get things back to normal (or even close to normal).

Been there, done that, and glad I am retired now so I don't get phone calls at 2 AM to come fix it!

Semper Vaporo

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Posted by tree68 on Thursday, October 11, 2018 12:06 PM

Semper Vaporo
Hey... sometimes hardware breaks.

Indeed - or a lightning strike, or a backhoe finds a fiber optic line, or any of a host of other potential interuptions.

One morning this past spring my fire department responded to a grass fire - or so we thought.  What had actually happened was a primary line on a pole had been loosened from the insulator on one pole and was hanging low.  With our usual westerly winds, this wasn't a problem, but the winds changed to easterly.

The primary blew into the carrier for a fiber optic line hanging below it on the pole, instantly turning the carrier cable into one big heating element and incinerating six poles worth of a 96 fiber cable.  The "grass fire" was due to the burning insulation from the fiber optic line dropping to the ground.  We were very cautious until we were sure all was dead.

A technician from the fiber cable owner arrived on the scene before we had called anyone - he was getting numerous reports of outages.

Full service on the line wasn't restored until later that evening, when a new piece of cable had been spliced in.

The folks who were driving by at the moment it happened were surprised, to say the least.

LarryWhistling
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Posted by BaltACD on Thursday, October 11, 2018 1:47 PM

Semper Vaporo
Hey... sometimes hardware breaks.  Sometimes new software needs to be installed (even if not the actual forum software, but the operating system or even some other bit of software used on the same system, such as drivers for a new piece of hardware) and the "update" has a flaw that was not detected in the testing done before release.  Even a backhoe has been known to knock out a connection and shut things down.

It is possilbe that something got really hosed and data was lost and it can take a while to get things back to normal (or even close to normal).

Been there, done that, and glad I am retired now so I don't get phone calls at 2 AM to come fix it!

All that is true, however, it seems like Kalmbach is having more than their statistical fair share of 'failures' in much too short of a time period.  

Most entities, when they are making such upgrades or changes will have their systems display some form of screen to notify users that 'something' is in progress.  Just having a request for 'service' time out is not being 'user friendly'.

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Posted by BaltACD on Monday, October 22, 2018 7:28 AM

On 10/21 I recieved e-mail notifications of a number of PM's that were sent to me from 10/14 to 10/19.  Is Kalmback IT working on Sundays?  Did they find that they had tripped a 'option switch' the last time the went into the guts of the forum package and corrected it?  The way things happen with this forum software never cease to amaze me, and not in a good way!

Never too old to have a happy childhood!

              

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Posted by Deggesty on Monday, October 22, 2018 8:05 AM

Apparently someone was working yesterday; when I got to my e-mail inbox this morning, it was full of old posts that I had already received.

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Posted by matthewsaggie on Monday, October 22, 2018 10:33 AM

I keep getting newswire posts from 2010, not current news.

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Posted by Semper Vaporo on Monday, October 22, 2018 10:56 AM

The system was working yesterday afternoon, but when I went to refresh the list of topics, it didn't come back.  It came back after about 10 minutes of retrying the site.  I assume either someone was updating the site and had taken it off-line or maybe some hardware failed and someone replaced it and rebooted the servers.

I really don't know how long the site was down as I had been busy with other things for about an hour before I tried to refresh the topics list. 

Semper Vaporo

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Posted by GeoffS on Monday, October 22, 2018 11:57 AM

Ditto about the old newswire posts. Nov. 2010.

For me it has been happening for almost a week!

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Posted by Deggesty on Tuesday, October 23, 2018 2:22 PM

Maybe the system has caught up with e-mailing posts to those who want them; I had many, many, in my e-mail when I logged on this morning, and they kept coming most of the morning--and there were no more when I came back from lunch.

Johnny

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Posted by BaltACD on Tuesday, October 23, 2018 8:56 PM

A gripe - and this has been since prior to either of the last two 'updates'.

When you read/participate in a thread - the thread title turns gray, indicating you have read the thread and there have been no additional posts to the thread since you last accessed it. 

Too frequently, I go away for a few hours/days and when I come back, a thread I have previously accessed has a red title.  I go to read the thread only to find out the last post in the thread is the same as it was when I left the thread several hours/days ago.

Never too old to have a happy childhood!

              

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Posted by Semper Vaporo on Tuesday, October 23, 2018 9:12 PM

I think that happens when someone makes a post that gets deleted for some reason (spam, obscene, etc.).  It could also be someone edited their post... even if they only added punctuation or corrected a typo... or even if they opened it to edit it and then did nothing but click the Submit button.

 

Semper Vaporo

Pkgs.

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