Issues with site on Linode because domain’s registration had expired

Installation
1

Well, we’re currently using Linode and are having all sorts of problems. Our site has been off line since last wednesday. I was about to start a new topic on this but saw yours so I thought I would just add to this one. I contacted Linode’s technical support and they informed me everything looks ok at their end. So is the domain address which is active. So I was about to contact the tech team here to find out whether the issue is at the Discourse end. All we get in our site when you search the address is the first page of our forum but you cannot access anything after that. Myself and our other admin person are not IT experts by any means. So we are looking for assistance any suggestions would be appreciated.

2

Hey @JayCee,

Personally, I think it would be worth starting a new discussion in support about this.

If you’re comfortable sharing a link to your forum in it, that would help people here investigate likely issues and potential solutions to them. We may need to ask you to provide some debugging information, but we’ll always be happy to provide (or link to) step-by-step guides on how to do so. This may or may not be proactive, but if you have any questions at any point, just let us know.

I think it’s very unlikely that the Discourse team would be responsible - and if there was no update performed on the day of the issue arising, we can rule out they possibility right away.

I’m not privy to your conversation with Linode’s representative(s), but it’s possible they simply examined the hardware resources allocated to you for defects rather than troubleshooting your installation of Discourse. They don’t offer a managed hosting solution - so making the software you wish to use work on their infrastructure is ultimately not their responsibility. There are managed hosting solutions available for Discourse, if you and your team would prefer not to worry about repeats of this kind of thing - however, they will be more expensive than self-hosting.

If you go ahead and get the ball rolling in support, we can follow up with you there. The best information to include initially would be the following;

  • A link to your forum
  • Any configuration changes (e.g. settings changes) which may have been made at the time
  • A list of plugins your forum has installed
  • Which version of Discourse you’re using
    • If you’re not sure how to find this out, telling us roughly how long it’s been since you last updated your installation of Discourse will give us a ballpark estimate.
      • If it hasn’t been getting updated - which would be terrible due to a lack of fixes for known security issues - an approximation of when it was installed would be helpful.
  • How you installed Discourse, if you can remember this.
    • e.g. Did you follow the guide on GitHub, did Linode have a “deploy this app” button, did you pay someone else to perform the install, or so on.
6 Likes
3

It’s unclear if you can access your homepage or if it just appears in search engine results, but if you can navigate to your site does it work in safe mode?

3 Likes
4

Hi John,

I was able to work out that the problem was our domain’s registration had expired, so once we reactivated it we got the site back up and running again. Thanks for the information you have provided, it was very useful. Just one final question. We are currently running the latest Discourse version but is it better to perform updates via the site’s admin panel and through Discourse or via the server’s (Linode) console? Doing it this way has caused us issues in the past. It is for this reason I also have reservations about installing plugins. I am wanting to install the Who’s on Line plugin but doing things through the Linode console is troublesome. Well, for us not being too technically minded it is anyway.

Thank you

1 Like