Tim Stephenson (Archant IS)

... One of the reasons there isn't an option for anyone to do that :) From a server administration perspective, lets just say that we have bigger things to worry about than reading someone's PMs on one of our many forums.

I'm neither a forum mod, nor forum admin.

Guys, Just thought I'd chip in here. PM's cannot be read by anyone other than the author and the intended recipient. It is not a case of having the right password - the forum software doesn't allow any users other than the author and recipient to access the message. Mods or forum Admins have no direct access to any of the web or database servers in our web farm and have no way to bypass forum security. Should you or anyone else have any technical queries relating to this you're more than welcome to contact me and I'll try to assist.

[quote user="Clair"]Thank you Tim [:)] [/quote] No probs !

We had a major storage system failure yesterday afternoon, which took this forum & a variety of other Archant hosted sites offline. Emergency work to restore service has been completed successfully throughout the night, and although work will continue today on a more permanent solution the sites (and this forum) should hopefully remain online.

"Thank you Tim. Was that a complex way of saying that someone pulled the plug out or that the keys were lost or that an employee under notice was hyperactive with the chewing gum in the moving parts" None of the above unfortunately... a large, very expensive bit of equipment decided to break in a way noone had expected it to break :(

"Interestingly, the property bit of the website (and therefore the bit that earns money) was up and running well in advance of the forum." The property service is hosted on a separate set of servers, and as such wasn't actually affected by the failure. Any downtime on that system is unfortunately nothing more than a coincidence!

All, Apologies for the downtime over this weekend. We've had a series of major failures within our web hosting infrastructure that knocked ALL Archant hosted sites offline. Our core web storage systems failed late Friday afternoon, which took most of our sites offline and the rest unfortunately followed later Friday evening. The faults were escalated to the highest level within the storage system vendor's management, and a team of 3 vendor engineers & senior Archant IT staff worked virtually non-stop through the weekend to bring systems back online. Most of the major failures were resolved by around 02:30 Sunday morning, but it has taken until this morning to fully iron out all of the remaining stability & minor issues. Our sites are now all back up & running, although we're awaiting some replacement hardware which should be delivered to our data centre (along with an engineer to install it) tomorrow morning. The site may experience a further brief outage tomorrow but otherwise stability should return. Kind regards Tim

If the undelivered emails were messages you've sent from your own email account, then its nothing to do with our servers.... Would advise double checking the email address you were trying to send an email to and resending :)

Unfortunately its a bit of an "all or nothing" exercise... either we release all emails in the queues for processing, or none of them get released. We opted for all ;)

Apologies for the delayed emails... one of our outbound email servers decided to stop sending messages for 48 hours due to running low on disk space. Its taken about 2 days to clear the backlogged messages!

Forwards in time, perhaps.... We've got enough wheels to keep things moving - just hoping they all stay attached at the moment!!

Web storage system issues perhaps, but no bandwidth problems fortunately. We've brought additional webservers online this weekend, and more will be following early next week. With a little luck, the forum should be more stable going forwards...

Unfortunately weekends are the only time we can do stuff like this - the server farm is simply too busy during the week to take it offline... even for a few seconds!

Think I probably beat you to grasping wood... We're moving some sites around between servers to better distribute our traffic across available machines. We'll try and keep any disruption to a minimum but if you get any strange errors - please just refresh your page.. Back to normal soon hopefully.