Planned maintenance

[Nexus]

Hi everyone, https secured browsing has been delayed while I work on ozmps.club website - think of this as a magazine style front page. It is not intended to replace the forum, which it links to and will remain in it's current configuration with incremental updates until such time it has to be upgraded or frozen - at least three years yet I expect. Hopefully Mazda will have pulled an MPS out of their hat by then.

Once I am happy with it I will begin promoting it proper, but for now it is unofficially online with one important article I would like everyone to read, and that is the Takata Airbag Recall. 51% of affected MPS models have been addressed. It's a scary idea that a device that is intended to save your life might end it, so please if you have any doubt about your Mazda's inclusion in the recall, do the VIN Check!

This article will be expanded as the website is constructed - I'm intending to cover airbag safety a little too - maintenance and real world driving, for instance push-pull steering has been recommended by some, and will look into the why and how.

Now that the base website is up and running, I'd like to hear from you if you have a vehicle to showcase and a story to go with it - with pictures, of course!
Likewise product and service showcases in a whole article format can be constructed - and I'll be talking to advertisers and vendors in due course.

https encrypted browsing is still on the way - haproxy has been installed towards that effect and I will be getting to it somewhere along the way. Sooner rather than later.

Happy motoring and safe travels.

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Hi everyone, doing some checks and maintenance on web load balancing this evening - there may be some brief outages as a result of testing and connection restarts in VIC. Currently it seems all traffic is passing through QLD and it should be evenly split between VIC and QLD - am investigating why.

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Hi everyone, the cause of this fault behaviour has been identified. Both VIC and QLD gateways are now online, and we should see some improved performance. Apologies for any outages you may have observed - they should have been minor and brief.
On this occaision the VIC reverse proxy, on one of two public IP addresses the website is accessed by was failing to pick up a default IP4 route. This problem has been present for a day or so during which time your browsers will have tried to connect, failed and then tried the QLD gateway which would successfully respond, so although the VIC site has not been responding to web queries, there has been no major outage.

Although I have identified the cause of the unbalanced web traffic - no default gateway on VIC reverse proxy, I have not determined why the VIC proxy has failed to apply a default gateway.

There will likely be another round of debugging tomorrow night. Again - minimal impact on browsing - your browsers will simply switch to whichever gateway is open.

Hi everyone, doing some checks and maintenance on web load balancing this evening - there may be some brief outages as a result of testing and connection restarts in VIC. Currently it seems all traffic is passing through QLD and it should be evenly split between VIC and QLD - am investigating why.

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Automated birthday greeting posts for active users have been disabled.
Users will continue to receive private birthday emails.
Security audit of various plugins and softwares installed in vbulletin is underway - patches have been applied to some components - some components are simply no longer under active development and have holes to patch - where they can't be patched they are being uninstalled or disabled.

https browsing is coming sometime after this security maintenance. Our current configuration of sitting behind loan balancing proxies has protected the site. Thankfully not seeing any sign of active exploits.

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Hi everyone, welcome to 2018, hope you all had a great holiday break and new year.
As I mentioned in the unplanned outage thread, there's been a major fault with one of our datacenter sites. Thankfully this has had little to no impact on ozmps.
I had a bunch of things I wanted to do over the new year break, but with the QLD datacenter basically down, I'm forced to wait until this problem is resolved.

It is an ISP fault, and it is completely ridiculous that the fault has been present since 14/11/17 - over a month.
I'm expecting this to be resolved this week, and I'm expecting the ISP to credit me three months fees for putting up with a more than one month long fault that was severe enough I had to build replacement services at the VIC site (email) and a fairly painful diagnosis process which is still underway which has basically seen me diagnosing their network. As you can tell, me not so thrilled.

On the upside, got some new wheels delivered today, it's going to be an interesting fitment exercise to my BK with 235/40R18 the intended tyre size.

There's a number of network changes I will be making just as soon as QLD is back online - secure web browsing is back at the head of the queue.

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https encrypted browsing config is partially configured. lateralcognition.net domains are functioning over https and using a lateralcognition.net certificate.
ozmps and other websites are responding on https - for example https://www.ozmpsclub.com - however they are currently using the lateralcognition.net certificate, which will throw certificate domain warnings in your browser.
You'll also notice the browser complaining bitterly that not everything on the page is encrypted; browsing the public websites including https://www.lateralcognition.net and https://www.ozmpsclub.com and https://www.ozmps.club will throw warnings regarding unencrypted images and other similar compliance issues.

https browsing config will be complete when the LC certificates are replaced with certificates issued for the domain being browsed and then the websites themselves are coaxed into compliance so that everything on the page is accessed through encrypted browsing.

For the moment you'll see a lot of warnings from browsers attempting to browse over https and will need to tell the browser to disable certain non-compliant content blocking to preview https

[Nexus]

QLD internet connection is now back online and reconfigured to use a new IP since the ISP could not solve - in a reasonable fashion or timeframe - the sudden onset routing problems with the previous IP which has been held by the connection for some years. Has been a complete circus getting them to even try. Worth a good deal of account credit I think.
DNS records have been adjusted to refer to the new IP
Reverse DNS records are still being updated.
Performance is expected to improve with both sites online.

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Hi everyone - One for the guests : I've enabled image viewing for guest users / users who are not logged in. We have around 80 to 160 guests browsing on any given day, I thought they would appreciate being able to view images. Posting, of course, will still require membership.

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SSL encryption is well tested now - the reverse proxies support SSL terminaltion - meaning data can be encrypted across the internet and may or may not be encrypted on internal network depending on the website config. Next round of changes will be
(1) Optional SSL encryption for OzMPSclub.com - optional to avoid breaking access while it is initially applied
(2) Second round of development on OzMPS - intending to add sections for vendors, service agents and tech articles.

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Have purchased an SSL certificate for OzMPSclub.com - will be looking at applying it over next week or so. Not expecting any immediate impact, some things will need to be checked for compatibility, such as tapatalk (which is due an update), but expecting relatively straightforward adjustments. One it's in place and enforced you will be redirected to https:// connection instead of http. This will improve our standing with google, as site ratings are biased towards encrypted traffic.

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SSL certificate has been installed. attempting to access via https:// is now providing a valid certificate. It is not yet fully functional because there are many links within the site that continue to use http://
Will shortly be testing some redirect solutions that will direct browsers to use https:// as preferred option - depending on compatibility I may or may not allow http to remain functional.

If you encounter problems accessing the website, please report issues on the ozmps facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/ozmpsclub/

[Nexus]

encrypted https:// browsing is now enabled and functioning.
SSL encryption is not yet enforced. You can still load the page as http:// however once you click links on the page they will direct to https SSL connections.

If for any reason I decide to roll back this change over the next few days the site may revert to it's state as of 8:00PM this evening AEST. Currently all is testing well.

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Have identified one glitch with SSL that breaks certain links within the site. I have reverted the site back to http as default while I investigate this issue.

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Glitch has been identified and corrected. https browsing is again enabled as default. I will be keeping an eye on and testing further before enforcing https...

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SSL is now being tested site wide and enforced. Not every link refers as https but in this configuration any and all connections will be made as SSL as the gateway is now redirecting any http requests to https if the site refers you to a http link you will be automatically redirected to httpsFor example "http://www.ozmpsclub.com/forum/usercp.php" will attempt connection and be directed by the gateway to use "https://www.ozmpsclub.com/forum/usercp.php" instead.Because there are still various http links within the site, the site doesn't get a perfect green tick on security, but this goes a long way towards protecting your passwords and preventing browsing being observed.While writing this I have found that tapatalk does not seem to like the forced https, so I am going to revert the configuration for now.I will post a note like this one when I am testing and update when it is fully functional.

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I've found that the SSL encryption currently breaks the advanced text editor features when posting. I will be looking into fixing this over the weekend - currently SSL is not forced so if you find something is not right with post editor, you can remove the s from https at the beginning of the URL in your browser and reload the page to get the feature back.

It may take awhile and some more updates to have everything 100% SSL compatible.

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I will be performing an update on the forums this afternoon. I will snapshot the system shortly in advance of applying the update. I may or may not close the forums while maintenance takes place depending on maintenance requirements. If I need to undo the changes I will be rolling back to the snapshot made in advance of applying updates.

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Forum upgrade process failed with a database error that I'll be investigating before retrying. For now I have rolled back to earlier this evening, I may have another run at it tomorrow - the forum will be offline during any upgrade testing.

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You may have noticed an additional menu option "Articles" and some test pages that were detected as new articles. These changes are partly related to system update (these features must be turned on to perform the update) and future use. As the site is now primarily a library, I'm planning to create article pages and some magazine like content. Previously I had planned to do this outside the current ecosystem, but as vbulletin supports it and it's now turned on, I will use it.

The current default articles will be replaced with OzMPS articles in due course.

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Making slow progress on the upgrade to the forum. Once complete SSL encryption should be good everywhere. Upgrade is requiring various small detail to be corrected or adjusted. Each time I attempt the upgrade there will be a short outage - just had a 5 minute outage while I ran through a test run of various package updates.