Recent site issues

[mal7921]

Visitors to the site since Sunday will have noticed there have been a few problems with the site. This was in part caused by the site being moved to a new server and also due to the backend complexity of the sites data structures.

As the site is based on Joomla!, all articles are held within a database, along with details on where the menu links to and where images and songs are located. There is also a second database for this section of the site, the forum. To allow a single login to work across both databases, a piece of software known as a bridge connects the two databases together and keeps common information in sync.

During the site move, the synchronisation between the two databases here suffered problems, and while the forum was alive and well, unless you had the direct link to it, you could not get access as all links from the front page were pointing to locations that didn't exist. To add to the confusion, some parts were pointing to the new server while other parts were pointing to the old one. As a result, trying to get to anything from the front page resulted in a 404 - Component error.

Once the main site was back up and running, we found a problem with the AMN Live! player, as it turned out the player was unable to find the song locations and this had to be refreshed in the database and the media folders re-indexed. This has now been completed and all sections of the site are now functioning normally.

With the help of the web host support staff, AMN was mostly back online at 4pm Easter Monday (UK time) and all media files had been re-indexed by 10am the day after.

It turns out that this site was the most taxing on the server, which may well explain why it had so many issues when moved across.

I'd like to apologise if anyone had any trouble accessing the site, and to thank the support staff who found and fixed the sync issue that was causing the problem.