Did someone crash the forums?

[MasterTracklayer]

Here I was, contentedly reading the forums, when a page refused to load. I tried a few more (tab refreshes in my browser), and none of `em worked.

I decided to try pinging forums.auran.com, with no joy. The severs wouldn`t even answer a ping. auran.com, however, would reply to pings.

After this went on for several minutes, I went over to the help-desk site, which was working, and submitted a ticket, mostly to get someone`s attention to the fact that the forums were (apparently) down. I suppose it could have been a net failure, but that seems unlikely.

I continued pinging forums.auran.com intermittently, and went to the store, which was also still working, and "bought" all the $0.00 items that I could find. I still can`t figure out how to "buy" the "free" stuff, though.

I tried to download one of my purchases, and the download server was also off-line, refusing to answer pings. I`ll get the item later.

About an hour or three after the forums went down, forums.auran.com replied to my pings, so I came back to see what had happened, only to see nothing about it, so does anyone know what happened?

I wasn`t sure just where to post this. It isn`t exactly about General Trainz discussion, and it certainly isn`t about any specific version of Trainz, but it does relate to the hardware that hosts part of the Trainz experience, so I posted in Parts & Labor as the closes match I could think of. If this is the wrong forum, would someone with moderator powers please move it to a better forum? Thank you.

Edit: I forgot to mention that throughout most of this, Content Manager was contentedly downloading a bunch of stuff from the Download Station without any unusual issues.

 

[frogpipe]

The system periodically falls on its face for a few hours. I believe it's a network issue, but I've never seen it explicitly addressed.

 

[wreeder]

Since it was in the middle of the night here in the US and I believe most of their services are hosted in the US, it could have just been an outage at the hosting company for maintenance. Maybe planned, maybe not. N3V doesn't seem all that talkative these days.

 

[pware]

From previous posts I seem to recall that the forum, DLS, DLC and possibly the Trainz Wiki are all hosted on Amazon's servers. It is possible that maintenance by Amazon or N3V was being performed. N3V have a section in these forum specifically for announcing planned maintenance - but the outage may not have been planned.

I have experienced no problems with the forum today.

 

[MasterTracklayer]

Hmm, interesting. I imagined that the servers were likely somewhere in Australia, but both "in the USA" and "on Amazon servers" make sense, too.

I don`t know about anyone else, but certain parts of the system --and not other parts-- most definitely "fell flat on its face for a few hours" for me, to (slightly) paraphrase @frogpipe.

@wreeder, I can understand why: barely enough employees to handle the technical side of business, nevermind enough to keep those pesky customers properly informed too.

@pware, I don`t recall that forum, but I think I may have seen it mentioned buried near the bottom of this page. Wouldn`t posts there show up on the What`s new and New posts pages? I tend to monitor them a bit, and never saw anything there about a planned outage at around ten to twelve hours ago or so.

Edit: I found it near the top of that page, and the last message there was about an earlier shutdown of the iTrainz server weeks ago, which I did see on those new-message pages linked to above.