Report board software problems here

[gigabytelord]

Did anyone notice that the board was unreachable there for about 2 minutes? between 6:48 and 6:50 CST? Not sure if it was just my work comp freaking out or the internet.

[d'Artagnan]

I was getting a SQL "General Error" for a couple of minutes tonight.

I forgot to copy what the exact error code it was mentioning, unfortunately.

[SCRawl]

SQL ERROR [ mysql4 ]

Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (11) [2002]

An sql error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact an administrator if this problem persists.

[Lord Revan]

Same problem here I dunno what's causing it but it is presisting.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Just like SCRawl posted:

SQL ERROR [ mysql4 ]

Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (11) [2002]

And this is the second outage in a few hours for me.

[The Yosemite Bear]

Me too on the my Sql last night

[Formless]

I was having on and off again SQL errors last night and all morning.

[AdmiralKanos]

I'm trying to figure out what this is. In the meantime, I've disabled robots and spiders in robots.txt, in case that was the problem.

[The Yosemite Bear]

well this is the first time I've been here since late friday.

[RogueIce]

So for reasons I can not begin to imagine, I get a 500 server error anytime I try to post or even preview a post in N&P. Yet it seems elsewhere I can post fine and other people can post to N&P fine as well.

WTF?

[AdmiralKanos]

It might have been a coincidence. Someone identified a weakness in the phpbb3 software and used it to begin attacking our site a few days ago, thanks in part to the fact that the server doesn't have a whole lot of RAM on it (yet) and can be easily overloaded through this technique. It's possible that you just happened to try to post in N&P when he was launching these attacks, which came and went.

A server hardware upgrade is coming, thanks in large part to one absurdly generous user (I should ask him if he wants his identity known).

[RogueIce]

It might have been a coincidence. Someone identified a weakness in the phpbb3 software and used it to begin attacking our site a few days ago, thanks in part to the fact that the server doesn't have a whole lot of RAM on it (yet) and can be easily overloaded through this technique. It's possible that you just happened to try to post in N&P when he was launching these attacks, which came and went.

Nope. It actually just seems to be the one thread. As I test I tried to post there again, got the 500 error. So I tried a new post in N&P and previewed, it worked fine. Went to another N&P thread, previewed a reply, it worked. I go back to the original thread, try to preview my reply...and I get a 500 error. Yet other people have been posting replies to that thread since I started getting the errors, so it just seems to be me for some reason.

At least when I tried copy/pasting my old message. I just rewrote another one (even shorter than my last two attempts, *sigh*) and it actually worked. So maybe there was something odd with the message or it was too long or something? I really have no idea what the deal was. But the problem seems to have passed.

EDIT: So I still had the text of the message giving me problems saved in a Notepad file and decided to preview it in Testing. Sure enough, a 500 server error. So it must have had something to do with the text of the message itself for some reason... The only thing different about it is that I had copy/pasted some text from a PDF file. When I took just that text out...it worked! So for whatever reason it was the text from the PDF that seemed to be causing issues. I have no idea why; it was eventually saved as a Notepad file and taken from there, surely that would have done away with any anti-copying code? I didn't even know PDFs could do that in the first place.

But that seems to have been the issue. Weird.

EDIT2: Okay, it was the quotation marks. They look different than the ones I see when I press the key. Replacing those fixed it. I guess that particular font for quotation marks or whatever that was translated over from the PDF made phpBB very unhappy.

[Zaune]

Just tried to start a new thread here in Off-Topic, and got a blank page each time. Saving it as a draft worked but previewing didn't.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Having trouble replying to threads. Same error as above; blank white page.

EDIT: Trying the same thing in Chrome yields a 500 error. Only seems to occur to some threads (obviously).

[AdmiralKanos]

That might be the PHP memory limit. The default PHP memory limit used to be 16MB per process, but it was raised to 128MB in recent years. I dropped it back down to 16MB during the recent attacks because that seemed to lessen the impact, but I can increase it to 32MB and see if that helps. Let me know if the problem persists.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Posted successfully. The change does seem to have helped.

[Dalton]

RogueIce nailed it. It's probably related to the PHP Magic Quotes function. Mike made a change that I think borked it, so in the meantime if you see funky-looking contextual quotes, change them to straight quotes.

EDIT: Issues appear to be resolved. Anyone else?

[Dominus Atheos]

Did Mike just restore from a backup or something? I'm getting SSL cert errors that say it expired on 03/21/12.

Also, the SD banner at the top of every page goes to the forum instead of the main site.

[JLTucker]

I'm having no such problems. Maybe it will help if you clear your history for the site, along with the cookies and cache?

[Soontir C'boath]

Did Mike just restore from a backup or something? I'm getting SSL cert errors that say it expired on 03/21/12.

The certificate has been saying it expired since that day for me.

[Dalton]

Did Mike just restore from a backup or something? I'm getting SSL cert errors that say it expired on 03/21/12.

Also, the SD banner at the top of every page goes to the forum instead of the main site.

What theme are you using?

I'll let Mike know about the certificate.

[Dominus Atheos]

Subsilver2

[Ahriman238]

Had about a ten minute hiccup of being unable to access the board, lost a post in the process.

[Darth Wong]

Had about a ten minute hiccup of being unable to access the board, lost a post in the process.

That sounds like a networking issue. Those happen occasionally.

[General Zod]

I'm not sure if this actually counts as a bug or not, but some of the topics I've posted in don't have dots marked on them indicating I posted in them.

I've got posts in the circumcision thread, but there's no dot indicating as much. Everything else is properly dotted.