Access to the communities: a shame

[LucD]

Am I the only one or are there others who have been having problems accessing the communities since a couple of weeks ?

- new discussions, if they are vissible, are shown but when you try to open one of them you get the infamous "system error" message

- in the morning (CET) you can't even log on to the communities

- most of the time the most recent discussion you see are at least 1 day old

- don't dare to use the spell-checker, you will loose every thing you typed and a blank discussion form will show up

- sometimes a community shows discussions from another community

- when trying to open a community you get an Apache error message

And I could go on...

I tried with IE 6 & 7 and Firefox 2 & 3 but I keep hitting the same problems.

And I tried with Internet connections via different providers.

It's a shame to see such a good forum for VMware enthousiast going to waste in such an unprofessional way.

Sorry for posting this to the VI Toolkit community but that is currently the only one where I was able to create a new discussion.

[halr9000]

LucD, I can say with absolute certainty that I've never seen any of these problems--and you know how much I'm on here. I would guess there are perhaps issues with a geographically distributed server farm which are not occurring on this continent. I'll make sure vmware sees your complaints.

Hal Rottenberg

Author of the upcoming book: Managing VMware Infrastructure with PowerShell

Co-Host, PowerScripting Podcast (http://powerscripting.net)

[halr9000]

Ok, I PM'd the community director. Hopefully the issue won't be fixed for you until I can re-take the #1 spot.

Hal Rottenberg

Author of the upcoming book: Managing VMware Infrastructure with PowerShell

Co-Host, PowerScripting Podcast (http://powerscripting.net)

[halr9000]

Darn...looks like I'm out of luck.

From the community director:

Thanks Hal. I'm following up on it, and I think we've found the root cause. I'll post to the community when I know for sure.

Hal Rottenberg

Author of the upcoming book: Managing VMware Infrastructure with PowerShell

Co-Host, PowerScripting Podcast (http://powerscripting.net)

[admin]

Hi LucD: This doesn't answer all of the issues you reported, but it does address the "system error" message and Apache error message:

We identified the cause of the 404 errors. As far as I can tell, it only occurred for guest visitors to the site (not if you are logged in), and only occurred for 2-3 hours following a crawl of our site by Google. The Google crawl was failing, and filling the Akamai cache with error pages. We are working to get a fix in place quickly, but if you see the problem again, it should disappear if you log in again. Or let me know if you see different behavior.

The "most recent discussions are 1 day old" is a caching issue. We are refining our caching approach, but in the meantime, you won't see this if you log in.

I have not seen a thread show up in the wrong community. And I am not aware of login issues. Do you see these regularly, intermittently, or just once?

Thanks for your patience, Robert

Robert Dell'Immagine, Director of VMware Communities

[LucD]

Thanks for the assistance Hal.

I'm sure you'll retake the #1 spot once your book is finished

[LucD]

Hi, thanks for the quick response.

I'm replying to this via email since I currently can't even see this

discussion in the VI Toolkit community.

Tried with IE and Firefox.

The oldest entry I see at this moment in the VI Toolkit is "How to kill

a stuck VM", last reply by Carter 1 day ago and I'm logged in.

On several occasions clicking the Login button gave the "system error"

message. But not today.

The fact that the VI Toolkit community showed incorrect discussions

happened once but lasted for at least half a day.

That was last week and it looked as if the content of all communities

had shifted 1 position.

If I remember correctly the VI Toolkit contained only discussions from

the Management APIs community.

The VI Toolkit discussions were shown under Vmware Virtual Disk

Development Kit and so on.

I just did a refresh of my browser and I could suddenly see all

discussions (also the recent ones) but when I tried to open one of them

I got the "system error" message.

I did a logout/login, today it works, and now I'm back to the situation

I described in the beginning of this answer.

The 404 problem seems to be gone, at least during the tests I did this

morning.

Yesterday I wasn't even sure I succeeded in posting this discussion.

It took me three attempts and on the last one I got a "system error".

[admin]

Thanks for the information. I'm having my engineering manager look at this. Regards, Robert

[LucD]

Good news (I hope ), since more than 1 hour everything is working again.

I was even able to post a reply without having to enter it multiple times.

Well done (if something was done at least) or otherwise I classify it as an IT mystery...

[LucD]

I spoke too soon.

The phenomena were I can't see the latest entries is back (intermittently).

[LucD]

And now it looks OK again since a couple of hours except for a few gateway timeouts.

[jeanchen]

Hi,

My name is jean and I'm the dev lead for Community. Robert told me that you had problems with the site even when you logged in. Can you email me the details next time you got System Error/404 errors? Such as screenshot, time(GST), link URL you click when you got the error. My email address is and you can send me the files and details directly. In order to track down the issues, I need the details for each error you had including a screenshot if possible.

Hopefully that I can solve your problems soon.

Sorry for the troubles.

Thanks!!

jean