SOAR

Many of you have noticed some “extra” information that gets included with certain error messages you receive from Email Lists. Things like too many recipients or email too large.

We have cleaned this up to assist customers in focusing on the core error message within the email.

As your site grows, at some point you will want to see what is taking up space. Admin/Control Panel/Storage Space will tell you the summary information for that.

We’ve added two Reports on that page that will let you look at the Files (in the Files section) and Attachments (to Announcements, Events, Custom Pages) and sort the results in a variety of ways.

There is now a Report at Admin/Control Panel/Cal Sync that will show you the currently active Calendar Subscriptions for your website. It will show the Username of the account they were made with and the Den/Patrol filter choices they are using.

This can be useful for Administrators to view how the Calendar Sync feature is being used by their members.

We have added a Weight field to each PayPal button that will allow you to create your own custom display order for these items. The Weight field works just like in Dens/Patrols and is a value from -10 to 10. The lower the number, the higher in the list the item will display.

The Calendar Sync feature of your SOAR website is available in the Advanced Package and allows your members to keep their personal digital calendars in sync with your unit website calendar through use of the iCalendar standard.

Members will go to the Calendar Sync page on your SOAR website. They will click on the subscription link and your unit website calendar will then be synched with their personal digital calendar. All future updates to the calendar on your SOAR website will show up in each member’s personal digital calendar !

This feature provides the following benefits:

• It will save a lot of time for your members, because they do not need to manually add unit events to their personal digital calendars.
  

Since our service started in 1996, SOAR has had a disaster recovery plan in place that insures that we can restore your website should hardware failures occur on our servers. Each server we use is a dedicated server – meaning we are the only company with access to the server. Each server itself has redundant hard drives (RAID), power supplies, cpus, and memory. We perform monthly full backups and daily incremental backups of each server. These backups are stored both locally on each server and remotely as an extra precaution.

Over the years we have had to rely on this disaster recovery plan a number of times due to hardware failures and our own mistakes. Each time we have been able to restore customer sites without data loss due to the multiple redundancies built into our architecture and disaster recovery plan.

Our dedicated servers have been moved into their new home and all services are running again. The servers were taken offline at 3AM EST on Wednesday November 23rd, 2011 and were back online at 4AM EST.

You should be able to access your SOAR website without issue.

Have a great Thanksgiving !

On Wednesday November 23rd early morning we have a planned service window from midnight to 4AM EST.

All of our dedicated servers are being moved from disparate racks within our provider’s data center into the same rack with the addition of a private backbone network. This is being done to accommodate future expansion and to support increased transaction load from features like Calendar Sync.

There is never a good time for a service interruption. At the same time we though just before the Thanksgiving holiday would be good since many will be doing things other than scouting.

Our service provider has given us this window of time when the physical servers will be moved. Once there are moved access should be restored quickly.

At the end of August one of our Database Servers experienced a hardware failure and the rebuild of the server was having intermittent connectivity issues. We minimized the downtime to 3 minutes by placing an automatic restart monitor while we looked for the root source of the issue.

We are pleased to report that in the second week of October we found the issue. There was a small amount of corrupt data in one of the indices for the primary database table. The corrupt data was in an area that was not accessed frequently and thus took us longer to find. It was also the reason the Database Server ran normally the majority of the time.

Over the last few weeks one of the primary backbones for the Internet, Level 3 communications, has been experiencing ongoing connectivity issues.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2011/11/internet-died-little-today/44644/

While the press is only reporting this as a single incident, our own monitoring shows this is still an ongoing issue, although not as frequent or severe as the event reported on 11/7/2011.

We are bringing this to your attention because you or your members may be affected by this. If you see a screen like the following when trying to access your SOAR website, you are probably experiencing this issue.