As of now, Sunday Jan 6, 2013 at 4:30PM Pacific time, the forum seems to have mostly recovered from a major outage. I would caution that any NEW posts may become lost as I still do not have administration access to the system. Please have some patience while we ascertain the functionality of the forum software. Thank you.

give it time to rebuild..
i can't get into admin either..

Thanks for the good work guys and glad to see the site back up and running

A big thanks from me as well. We appreciate all the hard work you guys do for the forum. It must have been a big job to get things back up this time.

I was sweating, shaking...heavy nausea from withdrawal symptoms.

You guys can't be do this to me again...yes, I do publicly admit my addiction to TPF...

Thanks for all the effort. I had just gotten a topic update notification, and *poof* dead end.

So was I but that was mainly due to a cold / flu I'm just getting over . I was out sick last Thursday and Friday and had no access to the forum to help my recovery .

I am now able to get access to the admin panel so things appear to be back to normal. I'd hope that with the system rebuild that the indexing of the search function might be improved, but alas, no go. There's still a problem finding older posts (pre-2011) using the Search function. I'd still recommend using Google and the "site:forum.thinkpads.com" option.

Thanks to everyone involved in the recovery efforts... This is a great forum and resource for all. Thanks again!!!

Thanks for bringing it back guys! I'd love to know the cause, though. By any chance, did a truck hit a utility pole?



Ditto.



Ditto as well...unfortunately, and it's definitely the flu. The cough is so bad, that I'm on some Tylenol 3.

During the time the site was being rebuilt, there was a notice that mentioned an accident that knocked power out, so you may have guessed exactly what happened!

That was painful! However, it's a sure-fire way to elimiate spammer postings!

Glad to be back up!

Thanks Bill, Mods and Admins!!!

It looks like forums.thinkpads.com is still not working. At my last employer, all websites that started with the non-plural forum.whatever.com were blocked. I discovered that adding an s and making it forums.thinkpads.com worked as well and didn't get filtered. So all my bookmarks, history, and cache from the site are still not working. No big deal, but thought I would mention.

I'm in the process of giving up smoking.
Suffering from additional severe withdrawal symptoms from not having access to my favorite website was NOT conducive to those good intentions!
But boy, am I glad you got things going again!
Great bigThank You!

Yes a big THANK YOU from me also

I imagine how terrible it was for the regulars here....I admit I was a bit disconcerted with things after the 2nd day of outage

Welcome back to everyone! Group hug??!!!

(((HUGS)))

Great work guys!

I communicated with Bill soon after the site first went down and he told me about the car accident and resulting power outage which caused a corruption in the forum database when the server did not shut down cleanly. For the first couple of days I wasn't too worried, but when it still wasn't up on Sunday, I was getting concerned...

Whew!!!

Whew!

Glad this forum is back up. It has become my favourite and I'm a definite addict. Thanks to all that make this happened.

Great job! Thanks for bringing the site back. As other members, I also was starting to suffer severe forumitis extremis!

ok, here is the story as i currebntly know it..

the server is located in utah and one or about newn years day a car hit the power pole supplying power for a large part of the city..
power was out for abbout 16 hours more or less..
new cables had to be strung as well as a new pole..

the UPS's did what they could but the batteries only lasted so long and there are many servers in this farm..
they all could not be gracefully powered down before the UPS's died, this server was one..

when it crashed it took out some freebsd/cpanel scripts which needed to be rebuilt.. sadly, cpanel forgot to warn the server manager that they would no longer support cpanel opn freebsd..
the calls went something like this:
(poetic license invoked)
server manager: Help, cpanel is not working or letting me restore..
cpanel help: sorry, we dopn't support freebsd since last august, too bad you did not get the message..
server manager: can you help me, PLEASE with your product..
cpanel help: YOYO (you're on you own)..
server manager: but i have been paying monthly, why not help me..
cpanel help: tough

SO, now we have a whole new OS running a new version of cpanel, though i have encouraged the server manager to fire cpanel..

and the HUGE data file has been rebuilt and relinked and so forth and everything seems to be working well at this point..
some tweaking will continue for a few weeks..

Welcome back!!

I can stop taking my medication now....feeling much better.....

Back to Thinkpadding !!!!

Ron

Hello everybody over there,

it must have been some herd of trucks to bring the powersupply of a servercenter / backup-farm down ...
I, too, am happy, thinkpads.com is back on track, the one and only reliable source of help and assistence!

A happy and lucky new year to You all, especially to You Bill !!

Sincerely

It seems as default website page index.php is not specified for http://forum.thinkpads.com/ yet (it redirects to generic hosting page).

Thanks everyone who got it up and running again.

I believe this is grounds for a lawsuit.

Glad to see the forum is back up and running - Other forums (even one's that are not associated with ThinkPads) indicated this forum was down!

I'm a new member but I did notice on IE I couldn't get through and got a tip that maybe I had to clear the DNS cache, so for now I'm using Chrome.

The last outage had nothing to do with your browser.

So they were taking your payments, but when the time came, they wouldn't support you and failed to notify you when they were dropping support?
Can't you get the five months of payments back? That is pretty much theft

Thanks, Bill et al.

Bill, thanks so much for getting this site up and running again. Thinkpads.com has been an important part of my life since 2005 and is one of the dozen or so sites that I check every day. Even though I no longer own Thinkpads (except for a topless X32), the forum members are great and many discussion topics are fun.

Big thanks to Bill and everyone else in getting the site back up and running so quickly after such a major outage. This was the first place I checked with the announcement of the Helix, so you can imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth when the forum wouldn't come up!