Another Bump in the Road.

Just occasionally we hit a technical problem with the hardware and/or software which runs The Reeves Project wiki. If you tried to access TRP over the weekend of 26/7 January you would have been confronted by an error message rather than our Home Page, for which we apologise. Barry Reeves worked very hard with his service provider over the following days to get TRP back for us. Here's Barry's summary of the outage

On Saturday January 26th, the TRP website experienced an outage that prevented all users from accessing the site. The message “Tiki is not properly set up” was displayed when anyone tried to view the site.

Over the next couple of days, I (Barry) worked with the tech support team at our hosting provider to determine and eventually correct the problem that caused the outage. The root cause of the issue turned out to be several conflicting configuration settings on the server that the TRP website is hosted on. The configuration settings were incorrect as a result of the hosting provider moving the TRP website to a different server on Saturday January 26th. They did this without our prior knowledge in response to an email deliverability issue we had reported to them several days earlier. Their reasoning was that by moving the site to another server whose IP address was not being blocked by some ISP’s, our email issue would go away. What they did not realize was how sensitive the Tiki software was to certain configuration changes that occurred as a result of moving the site to a different server. Once these differences were resolved, the site returned to normal availability.

For the record, the TRP website returned to normal status on Tuesday morning January 29th at approximately 1:30 am central time.

The good news is we didn't loose any data; the not so good news is that we think we still have some e-mail delivery issues but at least our server's IP address isn't now part of a block of IP addresses on a major black-list. Update 5Feb13 - e-mail issue now seems resolved as well - please login to see further details.

This outage also prompted us to look at how we might best communicate to all community members when The Reeves Project wiki is unavailable. Please review our latest FAQ - Is TRP Down? Where to find Status Updates.

Wiki Stats - End January 2013

The total number of pages in the Wiki (as at 1 February 2013) now stands at 5247 (previously 5124, 5005, 4920), an increase of 123 pages during the past month. Of these 1020 pages (was 969, 909, 896) begin with number and are most probably a date related gleaning. We currently have 2154 wiki pages categorised as "People", of which 1748 begin with the letter "R". Last month has seen a big increase in the number of pages categorised as People, the result of an exercise to review all the "Person" pages in the Wiki.

TRP Users

We currently have 106 user accounts on TRP, including 3 new members who successfully activated their account in January. We welcome Jana, Carrie & Marian and look forward to their contributions to The Reeves Project wiki during 2013.