About the EK Server Difficulties
This just in from Baron Mael Eoin mac Echuid, EK System Administrator. He encourages anyone who detects any problems he might not already know about to contact him directly. ( E-mail Baron Mael Eoin )
Greetings to the populace of the Kingdom,
As everyone is aware, there are issues with our old sever at this time, causing much frustration with regards to the Kingdom site in general and the EK Calendar in particular.
While we’re trying to get the hosting company to help in any way, I have copied all of the events during one of the interludes where the database was briefly working and manually recreated the Event list as it was.
Yes, this does include the issue of “the data is a month old”. We’re, again, trying to get the hosting company to tell us why that is since we had nothing to do with that. We’d also like them to restore our data, but communication with them is spotty and they’ve not been proactive about informing us of any issues or actions that have (obviously) taken place. Any updates or changes to listed events can be sent to me and I will manually update the listing as soon as I can.
It has been quite a frustrating few months, we know, and this appears to be the bitter cherry atop a whole cake of layers of frustration. Explanations won’t help much… At the end of the day, it’s affecting the dissemination of information, updates on events, the ability to get addresses and directions…
We want to mitigate further issues and get things back to as smooth as they should be. The successes of the past few months of migration are significantly diminished by the huge, recurring issues. Most or all local groups have been moved successfully and are working as expected, but that doesn’t help us all when we’re trying to get to Coronation or check on when 12th Night is, or what’s going on with K&Q Rapier.
Again, we apologize. We’re switching our focus from trying to fix the broken old server (to get the last of the Kingdom off of it) to recreating the site and information in whatever usable manner we can manage on the new server and try and cut everything over ASAP to cut those ties with the old. Customer service with the old hosting company was one of the main reasons Alesone and I started looking into this project 2 years ago. It’s just unfortunate that what was an annoyance for years (for us) has turned into a major annoyance for all, now.
That we’re not in a better position to lean on the new server, I personally apologize. We didn’t know all of the custom services and code that was holding everything up, as there was no documentation. While Lorenz and I have been figuring it out (and documenting) as we went along, it was slow going, especially with RL and other SCA obligations being what they are.
In the end, we know that as tired and frustrated he and I may be, everyone else is likely moreso, and not without reason. We do thank you for the support and any understanding that has been shown and we fully understand and share the frustrations.
If there are specific things that we can help with, know that we may be even busier than normal in trying to sort this situation out, but that we would like to know what we can do to bridge any gaps, update any listings or the like.
EK Sysadmin