On October 6th 2023, ActorAgeCheck went down due to scheduled maintenance. The maintenance was for backend configuration changes and updates, as well as a migration to a new server config. This maintenance had expected downtime; however, it was intended to be minimal and largely uneventful.

Unfortunately, a few issues became present during the changes. First, a VLAN configuration error resulted in IPv6 connectivity to the backend (which is the primary and preferred protocol that our site uses) becoming unavailable. This VLAN configuration required the assistance of a third party to correct, which delayed work on the second issue. Secondly, an incompatibility arose between the ActorAgeCheck Backend Server and the new configuration. This incompatibility caused a few issues that resulted in the site becoming unreachable (including an SSL handshake error, invalid routing, and a few other configuration issues).

We worked to resolve these as quick as possible and were able to bring the main website up with a warning that some pages may not be working as intended and informing users that images would not be served. We were able to correct the invalid characters being displayed and missing actor/movie/tv show pages shortly thereafter (both of these were new issues that appeared post-maintenance). Finally, we were able to bring the image server back online later in the morning. We are now at a point where website is back to being fully functional. We apologize for the longer than expected outage during this maintenance.

On the positive side: The website should be much more performant, and we’ve been able to push out the changes from Frontend 2.0.15 to every visitor. Ultimately, this change better positions the website for future changes and improvements.