Tonight I have been having issues with the UBCBG&CPR forums loading blank pages. This seems different from the stalled page loads seen before the server upgrade or the crashes that occurred just after. It happens like this: Any page from the forum will load as a blank page no matter how many times I try to refresh it. All other websites are OK. This carries on for a time (10/15/20 mins) and then the forum works normally for a while (making me think the problem was fixed) before loading blank pages again. It is working now but don't know for how long.
A couple more times to go, yet -- what was supposed to be a seamless and easy upgrade of the scripting language has been much more difficult. 5 minutes into 2 hours so far. There'll be a couple more downtimes yet, but we think we have the problem solved - just need to implement.
So... no resolution 5 hours in, and giving up for the evening. Essentially, we need to upgrade the scripting language on the server so that we can use the software that will power the revised web site. Upgrading the language went fine, but it messes up the admittedly-old ads server -- which then prevents the forums pages from loading (rest of site will work fine). We're talking about what to do next.
This is resolved -- we've removed the ads server for the time being, and did the upgrade of the scripting language today. The "ads", such as they are (since they were mostly used to promote UBC BG internal events or international plant programs like Linnaeus birthday), may return in the future.
