SOAR

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. Our Boy Scout Troop customers have been on the new infrastructure since Spring and we are now ready to move Cub Scout Pack customers over.

SOAR myPack customer migration will occur starting at 9AM EST on Monday September 10th.

NOTE: This only applies to Cub Scout Pack (myPack) customers.

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

During the migration:

• SOAR websites will still be available for all to use.
  

We have added a "No Parent" option for Groups.

Members of a Groups are listed in the Roster in the following order

• Scouts
• Parents listed under each Scout
  • Parents association with the Group is through the Scout
  • They are listed independent of their membership association with the Group
• Adults
  • These only show if they aren't a Parent of a Scout that is a member of the Group

There are many instances where you want to define Group membership for Adults separate from their Scout association. The "No Parent" option for Groups provides that ability.

You can now edit all Scout Ranks in a single page. Go to Admin/Members/Members Edit/Scout Ranks.

From this page you will get a listing of each Scout and their Rank. The Rank is a drop down box that you can change the Scout's Rank from. You can change multiple Scout Ranks at a time.

This is for Troop customers only. For Pack customers Rank is associated with the Den. To change the Rank of all Scouts in a Den, simply change the Rank of a Den at Admin/Members/Manage/Dens-Groups.

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.