What happened?

[PFVA]

I was missing it a lot.

In the meantime I finally signed in on Twitter and I have been watching "Morning Sheep" everyday. A lovely relaxing program to watch specially in these times.

[KlaxonCow]

Sorry, I didn't notice it was down until Giles mailed me today.

Actually, I also started to wonder if anything had happened to you, gravy, as I know you run the server... and I hadn't seen your name much in any of our recent threads.

Glad to hear, though, that it's just that you've been busy and didn't even notice there was a problem.

[Harlequin]

We were scrambling for days on #llamasoft trying to find ways to contact gravy.

[Foozwah]

Didn't realise how often I just check in to browse, even when I don't post, until I no longer could.

I noticed YY down about the same time that T4K was announced for the Switch, cos I raced here to say "Giles you bloody legend!" for sorting the port, but couldn't.

[ElfQrin]

By the way, is it possible to switch to https?

"EFF Let's Encrypt" certificates are free.

[KlaxonCow]

Can you install "certbot" on the AWS instance?

That does it all automatically for you. Goes and grabs a "Let's Encrypt" certificate for you, and renews it - with time to spare, in case things go wrong - automatically thereafter.

(It creates a ".wellknown" directory in the root, with files inside it, that the "Let's Encrypt" servers can read, check it matches up to what "certbot" is saying to validate that this is a legit request, and then serves a certificate that "certbot" puts in the appropriate directory, for your Apache / NGINX / whatever web server to pick up. But, to be honest, you don't really need to know that. Install "certbot", it asks you which domain name you want it for and then sets everything up for you, then auto-renews in plenty of time. You only need to know what it's doing to fix problems, but you probably won't get any and it "just works".)

There is a reason for HTTPS - besides the encryption privacy stuff - because most browsers won't use HTTP/2 unless HTTPS is engaged (even though the protocol doesn't specify that, this is how all the browsers actually do it). And HTTP/2 is faster - it uses binary headers, re-uses a connection for multiple requests, etc..

(We can ignore that HTTPS get you better search rankings, as this whole site is "noindex", right? But that is a thing too.)

Equally, though, if the response is "nah, fuck off, can't be arsed" then that's fair enough. I don't see HTTPS (or HTTP/2) as in any way necessary here - this all works just fine, when the server isn't dead - but only a "nice to have", if you can be arsed with a bit of configuration tweaking to get it working in the first place.

Like, I do this shit all the time at work - and you have to do it, because customers want "secure" and they want "faster" and they want better search rankings - but this is a different situation than that, and I can see the validity of "nah, can't be arsed" in this instance.

p.s. I think the more urgent fix is that it's only "www.yakyak.org" and "yakyak.org" doesn't work. Chuck a CNAME in the DNS to make "www.yakyak.org" canonical. Job done.

[Ratsoap]

Sorry, I didn't notice it was down until Giles mailed me today.

The AWS instance that YY was on was retired because of an underlying HW issue. I've migrated it to another server, restarted phpbb and things now seem okay

gaz

Ah, you forgot to enable the 'pay us money, and we'll do you the courtesy of telling you when the other service you are paying us for stops working' service.

[cj2003]

Sort of hate a bit to say that I've missed you all. But I have :-)

Good to be back lurking and reading

[Little stoned kiwi]

It's nice to be back in the old school metaverse with you all.

[Ollie]

YakYak goes down for a week, and look at the state of the world. Please, never go away again.

[MattyP]

YakYak goes down for a week, and look at the state of the world. Please, never go away again.

I was thinking exactly the same thing!

Mostly lurk around here posting here and there but enjoy keeping up with you all - the trails and tribulations of new tech, gaming, fluffy things etc etc. Amazed how long I've been on here... and what has happened in my life since joining. When I joined I lived in Droitwich-Spa and worked in Malvern. I now live in Hull and work from home. Hmmmmm

[PVB]

Sorry, I didn't notice it was down until Giles mailed me today.

Actually, I also started to wonder if anything had happened to you, gravy, as I know you run the server... and I hadn't seen your name much in any of our recent threads.

Glad to hear, though, that it's just that you've been busy and didn't even notice there was a problem.

Me too.

I posted on gravy’s Facebook page, then realised he hadn’t posted for a week and I got worried.

[Orava]

Yes it is nice to be back.

Get that https sorted quickly. Certificates are down to no money.

And stops my browser flagging the site as dodgy.

[Ollie]

I'm still getting occasional "can't connect to the server" errors, but refreshing the page seems to fix it.