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9th June 2011

There is a bit of cleaning up to do but basically everything seems to be back and working correctly. The links on this page have been changed and now point to lauriefox7a.me.uk/abdcl. This is fully available for reading and posting in the usual way.

I am very glad that I took the precaution to test the Bentleyforum set up. There was a difficulty earlier in the year with this site which resulted in my having to change to my other domain. That problem was said to have been corrected by changing to different database hardware but the latest tests strongly suggest that the fault is in the server script feeding the databases. Correct operation of the Bentleyforum domain in future thus seems unlikely.

So I am taking steps to set up another domain (forumbentley) and test it so that the club can take that domain over, if they so wish, instead of the bentleyforum domain

No data or pictures have been lost so far and there has been no need to take the forum offline. There is one picture still to be reposted together with one topic (not an important one) which I will do soon.

Let me know if you find anything that I have missed.

Laurie

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8th June 2011

Further testing today on the Bentleyforum server resulted in no progress with the outstanding problems. So I downloaded the script (code) and set it up on another lauriefox.me.uk server. I then transferred the current live database while nobody was posting and connected it up with the script. This has made a substantial improvement.

So the forum is now at www.lauriefox7a.me.uk/bdcl1testsite and the links at the top and bottom of this page have been adjusted accordingly

Laurie

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7th June 2011

Some further progress. The BDC Forum is now temporarily at www.bentleyforum.co.uk/bdcltestsite and the links will now take you there. There is some cleaning up to be done because the autologin does not work properly and the URL need to be changed to eliminate the "testsite". But, otherwise, it seems to be all working OK.

Laurie

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6th June 2011

Preparing for possible transfer of the Bentleyforum domain to Club ownership has turned out to be quite a complex operation.

Apparently Streamline.net who currently host my two domains (lauriefox7a.me.uk and bentleyforum.co.uk) had merged the original two separate accounts into one. They now need to be separated so that one can go to the club but not the other. I would have thought that this was a simple administrative job not affecting my code or data but this is where I was wrong. They say that the code will not be affected but that the data in the databases will disappear and that the data will need to be restored by me from my backups after the separation has been made. I can do this but I am not prepared to take the forum offline for any significant length of time if it can be avoided.

So what else might happen? Well, I would not be entirely surprised if Streamline.net were to make a complete hash of things, i.e. lose all the code and all the data. Now the database changes significantly when a post is made or edited but reads from the database only result in changes which are automatically updated later. So I take frequent backups so as to keep up to date. Not difficult and it takes about 15 minutes, including the time to upload the backup file to a dummy database to check that it will restore. But when it comes to restoring or perhaps uploading to a fresh blank database things take much longer because upload speeds are only a fraction of download speeds. Settings have to be made so that the code and the uploaded database data can talk to each other. Both the code and the data are quite sizeable and each take about 5 hours to upload.

When I give the OK to Streamline.net to separate the accounts the URL www.lauriefox7a.me.uk/bdcl, which is where the forum now is, will cease to work. So the forum code and data has to be moved to bentleyforum beforehand and users advised of the change. What I have decided to do is to change the newspage, temporarily. While www.lauriefox7a.me.uk is still working this page will show and you can get to the forum by clicking here

More later, as necessary.

Laurie