We were down from approximately 9:15 AM to 5:00 PM Pacific Time.

This outage was unplanned and not related to the work I’ve been doing to move our hosting.

forum.pianotell.com started having SSL certificate issues this morning.

I hadn't changed anything, but I thought it might be related to my previous CloudFlare changes. I reverted a bunch of things frantically but nothing helped.

I could see the site was operating, the data was fine, it was just not reachable because of a bad certificate.

Turns out it was related to changes on the FreeFlarum side and needed to be addressed on that end. I couldn’t fix this on my own.

I did have brief thoughts of transitioning to the new hosting during the downtime, but I wasn’t properly ready for that and I was hoping we'd be back sooner rather than later. I thought it would be ill-advised to rush down that path without proper validation, so I decided to hold until FreeFlarum could bring us back.

Also, my morning was packed with lessons anyway and I'm well behind on my piano progress... 😃

Sorry all! This was painful.

With the new hosting, I'll have more control over things.

--
Beach L168, Wish, baCh, WOW Petrof, Fake Steinway, VS
TIME

navindra changed the title to [DOWNTIME] SSL Certificate Outage on 8 June 2024 .

Pallas I wish it was me!

I was frantically validating my code for the new hosting but the outage in this case was out of my hands. I thought it was going to be back in 2 hours but ended up being 8 hours.

If only I was ready, I could have moved the hosting during the downtime and pretend this was all part of the plan. 😃

--
Beach L168, Wish, baCh, WOW Petrof, Fake Steinway, VS
TIME

    My experience with a couple of websites that auto-renew with LetsEncrypt has been good. You're saying your hosting company didn't have it set up right?
    Anyway, glad you got it sorted and the new cert is good for another 90 days.👍

    Make a joyful noise...
    Jane - expert on nothing with opinions on everything.

      Stuff happens. 🙂 Glad the site is back up again.

      Jane I'm not entirely sure what happened but FreeFlarum had made some SSL configuration updates and the outage was related to that.

      I'm also planning to use Let's Encrypt on the new host. I'm pretty amazed at how well it works and how everything is automated! Even better, it's all free.

      --
      Beach L168, Wish, baCh, WOW Petrof, Fake Steinway, VS
      TIME

          navindra
          Makes sense. Normally I'd get an "insecure" error for an expired certificate but Chrome would still grudgingly allow a connection. This was a different SSL error, though.

          Make a joyful noise...
          Jane - expert on nothing with opinions on everything.

            I’m glad everything’s ok!

            It's funny - Pallas and I speculated exactly that: CloudFlare being grumpy with the SSL certificate 😃 But it turned out to be on their end after all. Glad it's back now! I can rest my poor exhausted "Refresh" finger at last and get back to that piano 🫰

            That's a relief. I was unable to log on earlier. Thing is that it happened a number of days ago as well. Therefore I wondered if something at my end were blocking it. I keep getting McAfee trying to worm its way back into my system and have not been able to totally delete it. I thought mischief might be coming from that end. I'm an IT dinosaur. First computer I ever saw was bigger than a fridge.

            Very pleased that PT is back. Thanks navindra.

            This page didn't report any incidents so I assumed you were doing the maintenance. Sorry for the misleading info.

              BartK Not at all... thank you for getting comms out actually!

              Yes, status.freeflarum.com was misleading in this case. I guess FreeFlarum sites that don't use custom domains were working just fine and this site doesn't have a test for custom domains.

              --
              Beach L168, Wish, baCh, WOW Petrof, Fake Steinway, VS
              TIME

                Thanks for the update @navindra. I had assumed was the move you were talking about earlier, too. Glad to see everything back up and running.