New Feature ... thanks to Kyle(MN) ! - April 20, 2003 01:16 PM
At Kyle's request, I have added some options to the search page that allow you to now search classifieds for only SELLING or WANTED posts as well as all posts. Seemed to make a lot of sense to me when I saw the request.
Enjoy!
Written by Greg (Dallas)
Couple of new changes - April 18, 2003 08:26 PM
In addition to a bunch of bug fixes, there are two new features out:
1. Auto-preview. On main forum pages now, if you put your cursor over a message subject and leave it there for a few seconds, you should get a 'tool tip' style pop up window that shows you the first few hundred characters of the message. It has been received well so far and can be quite useful.
2. For those using the default 'synthtk' theme, you should now see the elusive PSI counter. For those that are not familiar with it, this shows the count of people who are currently online on TwinTurbo.NET. (Thanks to clever Damon, PSI stands for 'People Seeking Intelligence') :-) If you click on the PSI counter it will take you to the online members page which gives details of who's online and what they are doing.
If you run into any bugs or other odd troubles, please email me directly at: greg@twinturbo.net
Hit by 'Slammer' SQL database worm last night - January 25, 2003 01:36 PM
Which sucks. We upgraded to the latest patches to avoid getting hit again and our search indexes (sp?) got toasted. Search will be slow and inaccurate, not to mention the entire site will be slowed down because of having to reindex everything. Probably take a few days to get back up to speed, we have almost 1.5 million messages between tech and general now (general finally passed tech for total posts a couple weeks ago). Don't worry, all the data appears to be there and worst case, we have complete DB backups from yesterday.. so all the data is safe one way or other. I'm just glad the worm wasn't data malicious...
Written by Dallas DamonZ
Some bug fixes - December 17, 2002 02:44 PM
Well, I'm sure many of you have run across some 'idiosyncracies' in the new software. Rest assured I have been behind the scenes trapping errors, figuring out what's wrong, and fixing stuff like crazy.
Most recently fixed:1) Replies in events should now work.2) Some troubles reading the NA/TT Conversion message at the top of Technical are fixed.3) Problems viewing some user profiles have been fixed.
Also, if the other bug I corrected works properly, you should be looking at this news page instead of whatever forum you were headed to. I've implemented a feature that automatically forwards you to news when a new News item has been posted. Once you've seen it once, your flag is reset and you won't come back here involuntarily until the next News item gets posted. This is a way for us to reach all members regardless of how long a stretch between accesses they may have.
Enjoy! Keep posting bugs under the 'bugs' post in General. I'm knocking them out as fast as I can.
More info for you techies (if you want to move over quicker) - December 06, 2002 04:22 PM
It will take a bit for the internet routing to become effective, so in the meantime if you want to hit the new server do the following (if you're on NT, 2000, or XP):edit the \{windowsdir}\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file.
Put the following entry on a line by itself:12.96.164.84 www.twinturbo.net
and save the file. This tells your machine to go to the specified address for tt.NET, regardless of what the 'internet' is telling it.
You can also just surf to http://12.96.164.84 if you want to go directly there for now.
Server has moved!!! - December 06, 2002 03:38 PM
Well, we've finally gotten things to a point where we can flip the switch to the new server. The DNS is being changed as I write this and it will probably take a couple of days for it to fully propagate.
For those of you that don't know what I just said, to switch www.twinturbo.net to a machine in a different place, we have to switch the 'internet pointers' to look at a different machine. Once the order goes in, it usually takes a while for all the 'internet pointers' (DNS servers) to actually start pointing to the new box.
Due to this fact, here's what's happening: The new server is in our colocation facility and is running new code. It should be really fast now. However, the current server (which is also the database server) will remain where it is for a few more days. This way you can still access tt.NET no matter which box the 'internet pointer' is pointing to. Because of this dual duty process the new box has to reach across the internet to the old box to get the data (which is what makes the forum work). This access is pretty slow right now so, although the forum will be faster, it won't be near as fast as it's going to be.
Sometime early next week (Monday or Tuesday), we will shutdown the forum for a couple of hours as we move the old server (database) from its current location to the new colocation facility. Once that is done and everything is turned back on, the forum should be orders of magnitude faster.
We'll also be rolling out a couple of new things shortly after that, so stay tuned!
Finally... some *good* news - November 19, 2002 12:34 PM
Well, things have moved slowly, but we finally completed something we've been wanting to do for about a year now. The servers will be Co-located starting next week. For the non computer uber dork, this means we aren't going to be running off some crappy, slow DSL connection anymore. The servers will be in a data center with about 35,000 square feet of other servers, supplied by 3 power grids and 5 connections to the internet. We should suffer no more network & environmental outages!! Bandwidth will be large, so hanging out here will not be as tiresome as it has been the last month. http://www.hardocp.com hosts out of another facility owned by the same company just up the street, should give you an idea of the bandwidth. We're moving into a 'newer' facility they just aquired.
In other news, Steve and I did some hardware work to prep the main web server for co-lo and decided to mess with the dead drives, we managed to recover all the important data, so once we get things settled in on the 'new' server at the co-lo, we should be pretty much like we were before the crash. Yes, Boss mode will be back along with some other surprises we were working on.
Classifieds Posting problems - October 30, 2002 05:47 PM
Many of you discovered an issue where you would put a body in a new classifieds post and when you posted, the body would be removed and (n/m) was added to the subject line.
This has been corrected and you should no longer have any problems posting in classifieds.
Slow Recovery - October 29, 2002 12:32 AM
We're getting things built back up. As you've probably noticed, bookmarks are gone and unercoverable at this point. Rides are gone, but recoverable. Some of the FAQ and TECH items are back, but maybe not as up to date as they were before. If anyone works in hard disk drive recovery, or know a place where we can get it done for a reasonable rate, please e-mail me @ damonz@twinturbo.net. 1 disk is dead, the other that failed will still spin up, so there's hope for it... they're part of a RAID5 arrangement, so if we can get 1 or the other, we can probably get ALL our data recovered and go about our business (albiet with a different backup schema Greg and I drew up during our trip) ASAP.
We're also very close to going CoLo, which means more bandwidth (speed) because we'll be off this small DSL line. So that's looking up for us right now. The tt.NET store should be making a return soon, although like everything else ancillary, it's in line after getting things back in shape around here.
In the meantime, if you can think of a cool contest (besides 'I rule, give it to me') for some Japanese Z goodies, let us know! We need to unload the goody bag.
Servers are down. Temporary Patch for now >> - October 16, 2002 04:02 PM
On the morning of 10/15/02, our primary web server crashed for some reason. It is definitely a disk access issue, but what we are trying to figure out is whether our RAID controller went bad or whether some of our disks actually crashed. Hopefully the former.
This problem affected TwinTurbo.NET, 350zforum.com, ttzd.com, zcluboftexas.org, zcca.org, and zcluboftexas.org which are all hosted on our server.
Damon and I managed to hax0r together enough Frankenstein pieces from our own systems to move tt.NET to the database server and get it running from there, which is what you are utilizing now.
To do this, we had to move newer code up that we had not yet released, so you are getting some new features now that we were not planning to push out so soon.
First off, search is modified and is now accurate and up to date. It is utilizing a totally new search engine than it used to. Click on Search, then click the little question mark icon to get help on all the different ways you can search now. The current method does have one problem. If you include words that the engine 'ignores' it will not return anything, which is unfortunate. Usually common English words and/or single letter words will cause this. If you get it, just remove those items and search again. I do have a fix for this (which is to index EVERYTHING) but it hasn't been implemented yet.
Also, you'll notice that you were dumped on the News page right away. We now flag accounts so whenever a new NEWS item is added, you will be redirected the first time you hit the site again so you can see it.
Damon and I are headed to Japan tomorrow morning for 10 days so this couldn't have come at a worse time. Therefore, this solution will have to suffice for the time being. Since this is a cobbled together patch right now, you will notice a lot of things don't work (like missing pages, etc.) This will definitely occur on 'DOCS', 'TECH', 'LINKS', 'RIDES', and 'CHAT' until we can get our original drives up and running again. However, the forums are fully functional.
Also, because we were in the middle of building some new stuff, this 'patch' is hardwired to our original theme graphics. If you were in boss mode, etc. you'll just have to live with it for now as we are overriding you since those themes have been broken in the new stuff.
Sorry for the troubles and we will be back to full speed as soon as we can be when we return. If Steve gets everything up and running and the drives are OK, he will switch back to the 'live' system which will re-enable all the broken stuff, but will take away the new features until we can get back.
