Current Website Issues

Considering the level of talent we have amongst the COPA members, I am not surprised in the least that they were able to come up with a workaround :grinning: Appreciate all the hard work.

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Dear Erik

Not sure if this is the correct contact place , having just bought another SR22 I would like to upgrade to a full members of COPA , How can i do this ?

Many Thanks

Nick

Nick,

I am not part the COPA board or a volunteer with special access or knowledge.
However, Erik and others I believe are largely side tracked for a few days dealing with the repercussions of the hack of managed.com which has taken a lot of core services offline. Hopefully, things will be back to normal in a couple of days; but they are likely swamped until then.

So, if you can hold your request for a couple of days, I am sure Erik and others will be able to get to you.

Thanks,

Tim

I’ve sent you a private message, we will get something worked out for you ASAP!

WTF? I would be livid.

What’s the COPA architecture look like? Something that could be moved to AWS/Azure?

Nick,

You should now have access.

Please let me know if you do not.

I have to admit, this board is very responsive and awesome.

Tim

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Dan,

Fair question, the simple answer is yes we can move to Azure. We are already on AWS with the forums (this site)

The longer answer is more complicated.

We are in fact already up and running a new instance of the site and passport in Azure. This will be our new environment moving forward.

We have however not made a switch due to a number of User experience issues that would arise at this point with not having access to some key info from the Managed.com environment. Currently to make the switch it would require us to have everyone reset passwords at their next visit.
Since all current members have access to the forums, with a login via email workflow that keeps them logged while we get things sorted out, we feel waiting to get the info from Managed is the correct course of action at this time.

The data we need from managed is, specifically the most recent backups.

In this attack case both our servers and the separate backup systems that we contracted managed.com to “manage”, have been affected by this outage. This is not something they or we ever foresaw. Specially, With both the data and backups being geo-redundant, the hosting contract parameters as strong as they are, the expectations was we would never be down for more than 4-8 hours in a worst case scenario as we spooled up something elsewhere.

Frankly the communication from managed.com has been very lacking. So while we are hoping for the best, we are planning for the worst, which frankly in our situation isn’t all that bad, worst case a password reset may be required in the near future. But currently we feel it’s best to wait until we have a better understanding of the timeline of things from managed.com before flipping that switch, as once we do, there is no turning back.

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Thank you for your efforts and work on this, I am sure it is complicated and time consuming. We appreciate it!

Good stuff Erik. You guys don’t miss a beat. Didn’t mean for that to come off as interrogative and hope it didn’t, rather genuine curiosity. Was just wondering whether the COPA infrastructure was colo’ed or running as iaas/paas.

I’ve actually been really impressed with what MS has pulled off with Azure in the last few years - more so than AWS.

Sounds like we’re almost out of the woods, no doubt through you and the team’s foresight.

Thanks as always for all you guys do.

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As I’m sure both you and Mitch know, I have no idea what happened, what “managed” even is let alone what it did (or did not) and so on.

But I’m also sure that you and Mitch have done a great job in getting the situation in hand rapidly and efficiently.

COPA is very lucky to have you both. Thanks for all that you do for us!

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We will be going to a PaaS model on Azure with triple-redundant backup strategy going forward :wink:

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Erik & Mitch,
This pain neither of you need or deserve! I certainly appreciate that this proves the old planning adage that “There’s always something worse than your ‘worst case’ scenario, even when you plan for something worse.” that it’s really out of your control entirely makes it even more frustrating.

Your efforts and dedication are admirable and in keeping with the finest traditions of COPA’s history of extraordinary volunteerism.

#InBeforeKeyboardCommandoCritics

good luck

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