SOAR

SOAR and Troopmaster have added support for importing the 4th adult in a Scout's record from Packmaster and Troopmaster Web products. Previously the 4th adult was not imported.

Our apologies.

We were making some DNS changes in the background for later tonight during the backup period. The change went through immediately though and caused the DNS servers to be offline for a few minutes.

Service to SOAR websites was intermittent between 9:30-9:45 PM EST tonight.

All back to normal now !

SOAR Support

We wanted to give you an update on email features on your SOAR myTroop website after the migration yesterday.

Email Aliases

• There has been no issues with Email Aliases working

Email Lists

• We did receive some reports late Monday and early Tuesday about email to Email Lists not going through
• Upon investigation we found errors in about 10% of the Email Lists migrated over
• At 10AM EST today we fixed all those issues
• We also ran a full site check on all Email Lists to double check – all are working properly
• If you sent email to an Email List yesterday or today and believe it did not go through, send it again now – it will go through !
  

At 3:30 PM EST the migration of SOAR myTroop customers to the new infrastructure was completed.

We are starting to see customers access their websites on the new infrastructure and email flowing through the new email servers.

The new mailserver has a new IP Address which does not have any “reputation” associated with it. Email might be a little slow for the next 24 hours because of this. After all the DNS changes occur tomorrow, we will be moving the old mailserver IP Address which does have a good reputation over which will fix the issue.

When you see the switch will depend on a variety of things. It can take DNS changes some time to propagate across the Internet.

We have been working on a plan to upgrade our infrastructure for some time. This upgrade will allow us to provide additional capabilities/services to customers as well as increase our ability to serve customers during emergency situations, like last week. We have the new infrastructure in place and have successfully completed testing of SOAR services as well as customer migration.

The first step in the plan is to migrate SOAR myTroop customers to the new infrastructure.

SOAR myTroop customer migration will occur starting at 8AM EST on Monday May 7th.

• The migration will be completed by 5PM EST that day, if not sooner.
  

We apologize for the delay in getting back to you with a final report on the service outage last week. We received a final report from our service provider last Wednesday on the incident and spent most of yesterday working through next steps.

On Wednesday April 18th at 2:15 PM EST service to all SOAR websites was interrupted - access to customer websites and email functionality was no longer available.

SOAR has used Cogeco Peer 1 (www.cogecopeer1.com) for hosting for 11 years. The majority of our dedicated servers are in their San Antonio, TX data center. In theory, each of their facilities has redundant connections to the Internet. Should one of the connections fail, service to the data center should continue through the other connection.

At 2:15 PM EST today our network monitors informed us that all of our primary data servers were inaccessible.

We immediately placed a support call to our service provider www.cogecopeer1.com. They confirmed there was a network issue that affected their entire San Antonio, TX datacenter. That is something that frankly, shouldn’t happen. They are one of the largest hosting companies and redundancy should have prevented this.

We have 4 dedicated servers in that location. These are the servers that host the websites, database servers, file storage, and development environments for your unit websites.

At 5:15PM EST our Troop website server started having performance issues. By 5:45PM EST the performance issue on the server was non recoverable and we had to reboot the server. Access to all Troop websites was restored at 6:30PM EST.

This did not affect Pack website customers.

Over the last couple months, this server has started showing increasing issues.

We will be migrating all Troop websites to a new server in the next 30-60 days after we have completed a detailed migration plan. The migration will not have any significant downtime for customers.

As soon as we have exact dates of the migration we will share them with you ahead of time.

The normal EBlasts that goes out between 6-9AM EST was delayed today.

The EBlasts service started at 5PM EST and will continue through approximately 8PM EST.

If you have already done a manual EBlast Now this morning from your SOAR website and used the Record option, another EBlast will not go out.

If you did nothing this morning, the EBlast will go out between 5-8PM EST.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

SOAR Support

We have found a bug that was introduced on Tuesday (10/24). If a member edited their own Roster information since that time, their account ~could~ become Inactive. The bug only occurred for certain situations.

The bug has been fixed.

If you find a member that reports access to their account is no longer working, this may be the reason why.

Go to Admin/Members/Manage/Members.

• Change the Filter on the top to Inactive
• Click the Filter button
• This will show you all Roster entries that are currently set to Inactive
• If you find someone that should be active, use the checkbox next to their name