Saturday, June 20, 2009

Fixed: New Data Highlighting on Dashboard

A few days ago, I posted that some users were reporting that pages with new data were not being highlighted on their dashboard pages. The culprit turned out to be an incorrect system clock on the master database server. This seems to be the only server on the network which does not sync to a network time server. It looks like the machine has been 6 hours behind ever since it was brought back online after the fire. The result is that traffic timestamps for pages were 6 hours behind. (Let me just emphasize that the end user never sees these timestamps. They're only used internally for things such as determining whether traffic has hit your site since your last login.)

The result was that when users logged in to the WunderCounter less than 6 hours after their previous login, the new data was not being highlighted. I reset the clock on Thursday night. If your pages have been hit since Thursday, your timestamps will now be correct. The master database server now also connects to a network time server, so if the clock does get out of sync again (and clocks always do) it will be auto-corrected daily.

Big thanks go to Darla, Shahn, Carol and Bill who all insisted to me that there was a problem, even though I was convinced that everything was fine. ;) It just goes to show how important user feedback is. If you come across a bug, please do everyone the favour of reporting it -- bug reports really do work!

1 comment:

Hayden56 aka ~Darla said...

A big thank you is owed to you for listening and communicating back with the individuals who were experiencing a problem with the program!

I absolutely love my counter, there is not another one out there that is as good as this one!

It appears that the tech support for this counter is even better than the program itself and that saying alot, being that I love this program!

Once again, my friend, thank you for going the extra mile to figure this out. My counter is up and running perfectly again!