Web site faults

If you’re able to read this we’re doing better than we were a few hours ago :-)

Our web site decided to keel over today in a particularly odd way which is still undergoing diagnosis. We have temporarily managed to get some sections back up but cannot operate the full site – things like the bug tracker (again), photo gallery and bounty areas are currently “switched off”.

Due to travel commitments in the very near future – the web site failure is a classic example of terrible timing – we won’t be able to get full functionality for a little while. We may switch to pure static content just to keep things ticking over in the mean time. In any case, please bear with us and accept our apologies for the interrupted service.

[EDIT 28th August 2013: See this post for an update. This old thread has now been made “un-sticky” as it is outdated].

Great work by Andrew at the worst possible time to even get this much back online. Cheers!

Our web site decided to keel over today in a particularly odd way which is still undergoing diagnosis.

All the excitement over the show maybe has put RISC OS on the map? Well, I can hope, eh? ;-)

In any case, please bear with us and accept our apologies for the interrupted service.

The CVS viewer is down, but I can pick up a tarball of the CVS stuff easily enough – or specific build sources.

So… the basics (forum, OS images, sources) are back – that’s the important thing. The other stuff will just have to wait awhile, won’t it?

Well done on such a fast recovery!

Getting certificate errors, looks like a glitch in the hostnames?

I’m not sure what to make of that (because I’m not the webmaster and don’t understand such things ;). We do own the .com domain so it’s possible this is just a bit of server (mis)configuration.

Actually, I didn’t even catch the .com. Looks like the store link is pointing to .com, and that’s when I started seeing the errors.

Basically, the certificate isn’t including the .com names. So, it’s a bit of either server or certificate misconfiguration.

For the webmaster… assuming you’re running Apache, best bet would be (assuming that www.riscosopen.org is the name you want to point everyone at) to put these lines in your Apache config or .htaccess at the root:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.riscosopen\.org$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.riscosopen.org/$1 [R=301,L]

That rule will translate any requests that are NOT to www.riscosopen.org to that server. (I’m basing that off of accesses to the homepage at riscosopen.org and riscosopen.com redirecting to https://www.riscosopen.org/content/.) Then fix any links to .com. For search indexing purposes, this is the best bet – you’ll get dinged in search results for duplicate content appearing at .org and .com.

If, for whatever reason, you don’t want to do that, then add the .com hostnames to the certificate used for https.

Looks like the store link is pointing to .com

Which “store link”? Ta.

Alright, now I’m not seeing it (probably saw it pointing to .com (the one on the right sidebar)). Maybe I sent myself to .com by accident somewhere. Ignore that much. :)

That only happens if you explicitly visit “https://www.riscosopen.com/” – i.e. state HTTPS for the “.com” domain. We don’t use a universal certificate because it costs more (though we’ve enough in the bank now that we probably could; however, it’s such a rare thing that it isn’t worth it really).

If you visit just the “HTTP” (non-secure) site then you get redirected to the “.org” domain and upgraded to an HTTPS connection all in one go, so there are no SSL certificate issues.

Incidentally, the bounty and bug tracker pages are now back up, but the photos page is still offline. We’re experiencing high load – as you might expect – so have to be cautious about restoring functionality, making sure we don’t swamp the web server. October’s total load was a new record for us and November is already about 70% of the way to matching it, even though it’s only November 8th :-)

Following on from the above:

https://www.riscosopen.org/news/articles/2012/12/04/raspberry-pi-interest-breaks-site-traffic-records

Not a fault but can’t think of a better place to put it—the PRM documentation linked to from this site on foundation.riscos.com is no longer there. Is there a way of making this available again?

the PRM documentation

is included with the Raspberry Pi SD card image. Download for free or buy the ‘RISCOSPi’ SD card from ROOL.

Download for free or buy the ‘RISCOSPi’ SD card from ROOL.

Or for those who don’t want their own copy in a handy location that isn’t reliant of a working internet link and the goodwill of the people running the RISC OS Ltd website, just wait:
- quote -
We are undertaking a major overhaul of the www.riscos.com website.
Hence the item you were looking for may have moved or been removed.
We apologise for any inconvenience. Please bear with us whilst the overhaul is taking place.
- end quote -