Thinkpads Forum

As Ray reported last month, I have recently experienced the same problem. June 6 & 7, I could not access the website. Yesterday, June 8, I could get to it with no problem. Earlier this morning, I again could not get to the site until a few minutes ago (which is how I am posting this).

This morning, during the time I could not get to the site, I tried a tracert which got through fine, no timeouts. A ping also worked fine. My DHCP router is on a 173.65.x.x IP block and has been for months. I use Open DNS.

I have experienced no problems reaching other websites.

Is anyone else experiencing access problems? Have there been any problems at the hosting end? Has the site been down for any kind of maintenance? I'm just trying to figure out where the problem is (not that I could do anything about it even if I knew).

I am not sure about this morning, but yes, other days this site has been down at times. The owner is looking into the matter to determine what is going on. This site is hosted by a service the owner subscribes to, so the owner has to work with the web server provider on these issues.

OK, thanks. I just wasn't sure if it was something on my end, or not.

Gary:

I'm seeing this also. The forum is unavailable here in the mornings until about 10 AM. Pinging forum.thinkpads.com (67.214.227.38) works. Flushing the DNS cache doesn't help. Waiting until after 10 AM is the only thing that appears to work. I can't recall when this problem started but it's been at least a week.

At least I know its not just me.

Gary, not just you (or you and Mark), I've had the same experience in the morning for the past several days. I didn't know what time of day the forum became available, because I usually check early, then again around noon, or later. And it would be up again later in the day.

Thanks for posting, I too was wondering what was going on.

Same circumstance as described above by k0lo except in my case it's been at least 2 weeks, and sporadically before that.

Interesting - it just did it again. When I got the topic reply notification email to this thread and clicked on the link, the page wouldn't come up. That was at 4:48pm, EDT. I even tried my browser's link button I have set up pointing to the thinkpads home page and it would not load. I stepped away for a few minutes and at 5:10pm EDT, I was able to get to the site. WTF?

I have the same problems EVERY single day lately. Sometimes I am locked out for hours on end.
Talk about withdrawal symptoms

I just got this while trying a forum search...

General Error
SQL ERROR [ mysql4 ]

Table './thinkpad_2009/phpbb_search_wordmatch' is marked as crashed and should be repaired [145]

An SQL error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact the Board Administrator if this problem persists.

EDIT: Google to the rescue!

I think that's what you get if you access the second of two identical messages, that were erroneously posted during one of the numerous timeouts.
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=77347 works fine
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=77344 crashes with SQL error

Both are in Marketplace forum with: FS: Thinkpad T42P with fan problem $150 includes extras IMG
PostPosted: Tue Jun 09, 2009 6:52 pm by Oliver26n

This morning - so far, so good.

Again, I couldn't access the site most of the weekend. This time, the tracert timed out. Maybe a different problem.

Same for me. I was away from home this past weekend, and was using my Thinkpad at a Hotel, and couldn't connect to the forum a lot of the time.

Today, I couldn't connect this morning from the house, or down at the office. So the problem has nothing to do with my computer(s), or ISP. Somethings wrong elsewhere.

Yes, there continue to be issues with the Thinkpads.com Forum being unavailable. It does seem to occur especially in the mornings in North America time zones. As GomJabbar says,

GomJabbar wrote:The owner is looking into the matter to determine what is going on. This site is hosted by a service the owner subscribes to, so the owner has to work with the web server provider on these issues.

We appreciate everyone's patience with this.

Phil.

I just wanted to let Bill, or someone know, that there is still a problem. From just my location, there's no way for me to know how widespread the problem is and how many users are affected.