I was just on my way to bed and just wanted to check the forums before I go, and had to realize the webserver was down; I have no idea wtf happened, I'm just glad I caught it before I went to bed. Since the mail and news daemons worked fine, I had no indicator at all something wasn't right, and have no idea how long this problem lasted. I sincerely apologize to all hostees. I have no idea what the hell happened.

After restarting Apache, everything seems to be fine now. We'll investigate the incident and be on the lookout for further problem.
Once again, sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Update: After investigation, it seems like, some 5 hours ago, Apache couldn't make a child process it spawned exit properly; it tried to continue anyway, but failed - leading to the crash. Unfortunately, while the error log does mention the process ID, it does not mention what that process was doing. So while we know time and reason of the crash, we do not know the cause, and finding that cause will be difficult. (The process tried to exit at 4:43:30 - that means any of the access attempts before that could have spawned the process - it will be hard to find out which one.)

Somewhere between 23:00 CEST on 16.09. and 9:00 CEST on 17.09. (next Tuesday/Wednesday), our host will update the server software. This will lead to a temporary downtime. In all likelyhood, the downtime will be short, and we're expecting no problems.

Sorry for any inconvenience this might cause.
Ren

Once more, the time has come to clean up.
After the recent updates of all server software, and the arrival of a new hostee, it is time to purge the useless data out of our systems.

On September 1st, 2008, we will purge all unused accounts from any of Renegade Projects' services, including inactive hostees.

The simple way to save your account is coming to life.

The forum software has been updated to MyBB 1.4 series. I've corrected a few things that I found to be broken, let me know if I missed anything.

New features in this version include a warning system, new moderator control panel, internal modifications, and a new default theme. As I said, shout out if you see any broken things. If you don't like the horizontal layout of the new theme, you can check Thread View Options -> [x] 'Display posts in classic mode' in your User CP, Options page.

Tonight, I updated a whole bunch of server-software, some very deep within the heart of the OS - and I'm still not done. In connection with the recent DNS changes, this means that server operations are on a whole different basis now than last week.

Should any problems occur, especially connectivity or performance issues, please inform either D or me immediately.

Annoying spambots apparently stumbled upon our bugtracker. So I bolted on a simple guest-only captcha. Report if it malfunctions.

"My bot can't spam any more" is not a malfunction. Shoo.

I saw D trying to link to a project on the bughouse, and since the way that is done is kinda counterintuitive, I created a custom mycode snippet to do it - [ project ]
Syntax is [ project=ProjectNumber ]Link text[ /project ]. So [ project=6 ]RockPatch2[ /project ] would create RockPatch2, linking to RP on the bugtracker.

I also changed the [ modenc ] code to work like the others ([ modenc=PageName ]Link text[ /modenc ]), instead of its previous, more limited format.

An overview of all custom codes is here.

I have just updated MyBB to the latest version, 1.2.11. It seems the upgrade was successful, but if you encounter any new errors, report them to me or Renegade, as usual.

Some of you may have experienced some problems connecting to the server within the past few hours - I assure you these are not "problems" per se - quite the opposite. Today I finally upgraded the server backend and PHP to the latest available versions, which made some reinstallations and reboots necessary.

The reason I've not warned you about this beforehand is simple: It'd have been useless. Both shutting down Apache and removing PHP automatically and inevitably disables forum access - so how would you have read a post on the forums saying that everything is fine?

The forums seem to work currently, but I'm not sure if D entirely fixed them before he went to bed. The Bugtracker is currently out of Order, but on the plus side, ModEnc finally uses a current MediaWiki installation. So if there was any post-1.6.x feature you were missing, it should be available now.

It'll probably take another one or two days to sort everything out, as we literally re-installed half the services on the server, and have to go through several configurations, but I assure you nothing of this was accidental, and the server is not failing.

If you experience any problems other than the Bughouse being down, please report them one way or another, so we can fix them.

Rumor has it a part of our audience is unable to access certain parts of our network; since me and several other users can access everything fine, we can rule out a problem on our side - the most probable cause right now is a faulty DNS server somewhere.

If you are among the inconvenienced users, you'll either have to wait or try using a proxy.

Sorry, but this is beyond our control.