Server Issues 8/14/2025

[Lanji]

Greetings everyone,

Apologies, but the Server is currently struggling to behave. I'm investigating on and off as I get reports of issues, but I'm also seeing that it might be time to get some upgrades done. I'm hoping to get later into the weekend when I have some time for the upgrade before starting.

Thanks everyone, and apologies again!

-Lanji

[Sabre]

Thanks Chris, for everything! We all appreciate you and the game space you have made for us.

[Cobalt]

Thank you for everything. We greatly appreciate you.

[MustangGT02]

Thank you for all your help with this site.

[Kosh]

Much obliged mate, thank you!

[Lanji]

Hey everyone, quick Sunday update.

For the most part the server has been behaving over the weekend, with my automated monitoring not triggering any alerts. Linode has reported several instances of high CPU utilization, but I haven't noticed anything other than slowness at times.

One item that I did resolve over the weekend was a backup issue where backups have been failing. But while I was successful in resolving that issue, I'm still struggling to run a full Anti-Virus scan of the instance.

I'm holding off on upgrading the phpBB version and PHP version overall for a few more days until I have at least two or three nights to work on it. But you may all notice an upgrade suddenly one night. I hope that it won't be to much of a change overall, and perhaps a vast improvement in the end.

Thanks,
-Lanji

[Cobalt]

Thank you. You are the best.

[Lanji]

And a little more good news - The Anti-Virus and Malware scanner has been updated and installed. Macrossrpg.com is reporting as clean! I'm still running a full scan of other sites, and force upgrading a few out of date WordPress instances (which might be the problem too).

Either way, I'm still monitoring and checking in on things. With this news though, we're holding off on the phpBB upgrade until those two or three nights are available over the next few weeks!

~Lanji

[Lanji]

Update on yesterdays (8/20) downtime availability - I believe most of the issue was due to another background process running, a server backup. I continue to monitor the server daily right now.

The biggest concern is that our version of phpBB is rather old at this point, and I'm basically running php5 to keep things running for just this host. Its not something meant for long term though, so I'm looking at how much work the upgrade will be. Once I have a plan and a window, I'll announce here the update.

Thank you for your patience everyone.

~Lanji

[Cobalt]

Thank you for doing all of this.

[Kosh]

Thanks for all your work on this!

[Lanji]

Early Warning!!! - I'm upgrading both the phpBB version and the MariaDB version later this afternoon (8/24).

As Cobalt noted, we had a few hours of limited availability overnight, but every indication is that the boards are getting hit really hard right now even with CloudFlare in front of them. I'm also potentially adding a WAF in front of the server just in case.

[Cobalt]

We appreciate you.

[Lanji]

This is a test of the upgraded posting system!

[Kosh]

Its alive!!

ITS ALIVE!!!

[Lanji]

Greetings everyone, and welcome to phpBB 3.3.15 on php 8.3!

I have at least one more upgrade to make later in the week, and that's to update the version of MariaDB on the server this site is hosted on. That will impact all customers though, so I'm holding off a bit longer on that until notifications are sent out.

Here's a list of the overall updates, and status of things for the MRC right now:

* phpBB upgraded to 3.3.15
* macrossrpg.com php version upgraded for just this site to 8.3
* With Cobalt's agreement, Registration is disabled (we had our first bot registration in under 10 minutes of the upgrade)
* The "/docs" or MediaWiki site is password protected with basic auth for now
* The homepage images and links have been updated to match the new site structure
* I've started moving old resources and pages to a new "legacy" folder, that is also password protected

It's been a while, but I have to admit that the amount of tech debt I left behind from so many experiments is rather large! To secure the site further, I'm going to move things now then sort through the old stuff to see what might be useful. I'm also thinking we might need to do the same to the MediaWiki Docs site at some point too. Is there anyone interested in doing that?

Three other things for discussion:
* Does anyone have a theme/style they would like installed on the new phpBB system?
* Are there any phpBB extensions folks would like us to add in the meantime?
* And finally: Should we look at putting a CMS site system like Wordpress, Strapi or something else?

Final, a huge thanks to Cobalt and everyone who's still sticking around here. Thank you and I hope you enjoy the newly upgraded boards!

[MustangGT02]

Thanks Lanji. You rock man.

[Lanji]

This afternoon and evening were interesting server wise. Still working out why the backup triggered a full on slowdown with the database.

[Cobalt]

Glad you are so responsive, my friend. You are the best.

[Lanji]

Quick update - MariaDB upgraded to 10.5. Working on the next upgrade, so there will be another restart.