Doug's Journey

Background The card: The StarTech PEXM2SAT3422 is a PCIe 4x card featuring 4 SATA ports as: 2 x SATA connector 2 x M.2 NGFF connector It uses the Marvell 88SE9230 chipset The card features RAID 1, 0, 10, as well as SATA pass-through. Upon initially deploying the card, I experienced some very serious problems with it My setup: Server is a SuperMicro X9SCM in a 2U half-depth chassis. 3Ware Card exists with 2 1TB WD Black HDs. Motherboard Intel SATA has 2 Kingston SSDs installed in a RAID1 (Microsoft Dynamic Disk) OS is Server 2012 R2 This server has been rock solid for 3 years. About 1 year ago: I added an Ablecomm SATA card that has 2 M.2 connectors. It has housed a single Crucial CX300 M.2 SATA SSD. This setup has been rock solid with no hiccups whatsoever. Today: I replaced the Ablecomm PCIe card with the StarTech card and moved the CX300. I also installed a 2nd 1TB CX300 alongside. The plan was to mirror the 2 CX300s and start using them for prod...

The below video shows me discovering conflicting games that were auto-scheduled by the StackSports scheduling system despite a team conflict rule having been previously created to prevent this. Usually the system adheres to the team conflict rules I create. Sometimes (inexplicably) it doesn't. This video is an excellent example showing this is actually a bug, and not intended behavior. After making a subtle adjustment to a game time, it's like the existing team conflict rule "woke up", and triggered the red alerts it should have done all along. In fact it should have scheduled these games in a way to avoid the conflicts in the first place, and therefore the alerts wouldn't have ever had need to exist. This video shows problems such as: Conflicting games that should never have been scheduled at the same time (based on the team conflict rules that were already defined). Missing alert/warnings for "error" games that have problems (i.e. the gam...

This appears to be another bug. I am hopeful that it is only cosmetic and won't actually affect anything functionally. I'll have to test and verify that my matches ended up being scheduled to the teams they should have per the pairing template. I initially noticed the red warning sign next to the U10 Boys schedule. Upon clicking the teams in the schedule, we can see all the pairing numbers are in fact unique. Also it is interesting to note another bug manifest by attempting to sort the team list by pairing number. Anyway, I then click the menu option to assign pairing numbers, and we can see the error message up top. And again we note that all the pairing numbers are actually unique.

In this video you can see that games are being put on incorrect dates for the subround. Subround two should be played on March 9th. Additional total weirdness is that when I unschedule and reschedule the games, they don't even go back to the same dates they were originally (erroneously) scheduled on. I have no idea why the dates keep jumping around. This makes no sense. All my experience with the League Connect scheduling system prior to this is that games for a given subround are always attempted to be scheduled on the next available game date as configured in the schedule's settings. To add to the confusion, in the below video we can see that even though some games were automatically scheduled by the system for wrong (later) dates, I am able to move them back to the correct date with no errors. There are no scheduling conflicts at all. So I don't know why the system isn't putting these games on the correct date in the first place. Edit (2/25/2018): I b...

One of the big issues of StackSports League Connect scheduling system is the many small inefficiencies in the UI. For example: The order of columns in list displays can be rearranged & each resized, but these changes do not persist after you leave that screen. Filtering lists by various fields is inefficient because it requires use a a single dropdown for all of them, and you then have to type the filters one at a time. Reloading the browser window does not return you to the screen you were on. Each of these are issues because: Many columns are useless or simply not relevant to the task at hand. It is very helpful to move the columns you need to see to the left, and move the others off to the right (you have to scroll to the right to see them, but that's okay because you don't really need to see them anyway). The system does not remember your last layout. And there is no way to save default preferences. So every time you return to that page (which happens a...

This is one of the more frustrating issues because it affects more than just me. Our league has 18 outside teams this season who are not member-affiliates of our league and don't use StackSports. As a result, we enter these teams manually using the "Outside Teams" functionality of the League Connect system. Unfortunately there is a bug that prevents these teams from viewing or printing their concise schedule, and also prevents the coaches contact info from being accessible. This means coaches can't easily get the team's contact info when they need to coordinate details (such as for reschedules due to rain outs, etc.). I often receive these contact requests during the season and slow the process down for everyone. Although we can (and do) distribute a coach contact list, this bug is still a pain because people become accustomed to the convenient functionality. Also, for teams to not be able to filter the schedule down to their own games is a pain for them. ...

League Connect's reporting functionality is partially broken in Google Chrome. I think this is also true in Firefox, though it has been a while since I've tested it. Because of this, I primarily use Microsoft Edge with League Connect. The problem is that page showing the report output has its title text overlapping its pagination and download/email buttons. The result is that you can't download the reports or email coaches from it. Watch in the below videos where after running the reports, I repeatedly click on the download and email links. Nothing happens (other than the text to the left suddenly being selected due to a perceived double-clicking of a standard text area). Location report (doesn't have an email link, because it's not supposed to): Contact report: Here's what the contact report looks like in Microsoft Edge (which renders it correctly): (note for privacy purposes I have put a white square over the coach contact info section) ...

This video probably captures best the total wierdness and inexplicable behavior and display of team tags: In the video you can immediately see when I click Save Tags, suddenly 1 of the tags disappears & 2 new tags appear (out of the blue). The 2 new tags don't actually seem to belong to any other single team, so I have no idea how the League Connect scheduling system even decided to pick those 2 tags. Meanwhile you can see that in the team list, the Tags column never displays the new tag I typed, or the 2 that randomly popped into the team sidebard. All along the team list only displays the original "Classic" tag that was there prior to me adding more. Also, before I refresh the browser session, I highlighted the tag column for the team named "FCYSL U12B Kirtland/Bloomfield". This was done to point out that no tags are appearing for this team. However, I had in fact added some for that team as well. After refreshing my browser, the original (cor...

I just decided to use the "Find" function to look up a team. It was slow to load, and then finally displayed only the below: Then I clicked the Find button again, and this time it correctly displayed: At first blush it looks like an issue of slow server hardware not able to deliver the page up in time. Then on a 2nd try, the contents were probably cached and easily delivered quickly. The 504 Gateway timeout error may cause some users to think they are just having an internet connection issue on their end. But that's not true. This message is not generated by the user's computer or their network equipment. The message is delivered by the StackSports infrastructure. Most commonly a 504 Gateway timeout message would be delivered by a: a reverse-proxy (load-balancer that sits in front of a server farm, or external security/optimization reverse-proxy service) the web server itself Reverse-proxies are very commonly used in the following ways: Load-bala...

The initial team list in the schedule had various tags on the teams based on the registration categories. I need to clean this up before I start scheduling, so we have consistency. I rely on the tags to help me filter and such based on certain teams, etc. So it needs to be clean and consistent. Here many teams had one (or more) tags named "Male". I selected all teams and told it to delete these tags. Many of the teams then had the tags instantly disappear in the team list. Meanwhile, several others did not. Perhaps the most confusing was the A. Strikers which showed the tags existing in the team list, but not existing in the team pane to the right when I click on the team. You can see that once I refreshed the web page, all the other teams in the list with the "Male" tag now correctly show that tag gone. This unfortunately is all too common with StackSports League Connect. Oftentimes the set of data you're looking at is not current (even though it shou...

Here is a video in which I attempt to move a U-5 team from the U-5 Boys division to the U-5 division. We don't have gender-specific U-5 (we do coed at that age). So I need all the teams in 1 U-5 division. I will then delete the auto-created boys & girls divisions. As I attempt to move it, I receive the orange error bar at the top of the page stating: There was a problem communicating with our server. Try refreshing the page. This error message has been frequent and seems to kind of be a default error that is displayed in many server error scenarios. I almost think that if their web app received (or attempted to perform) an illegal/undefined action, it displays this as a panic type of error message. In this case, I have confirmed no connectivity issues on my end. Pinging below my internal default gateway (172.20.222.254), Google (8.8.8.8), and the last-hop IP to www.secure-sam.com that actually responds to pings (50.248.118.190) I also monitor StackSports serve...

Issue #2 is closely related to issue #1. Again after months of frustration in observing what appeared to be complete apathy or ineptitude with the issues I reported & associated tickets opened, I sent another email to StackSports in reply to a customer satisfaction email request they dared to send me. I let them know how disappointed I was. Nicely, I was contacted quickly by an employee who said his job is to take feedback like mine and take good notes to their management team in an effort to be in-tune with customers. He seemed very genuine and opened several tickets on my behalf and did take the issues up to his management team. One of the issues I requested was release notes. The vast majority of SaaS products publish release notes with each Sprint in their Agile Development process. There is no shortage of SaaS products providing release notes. I even emailed him release notes for a few SaaS products I use at work to provide some very nice (and simple) examples. He ac...

Updated 2/17/2018 StackSports does not have a customer-facing ticketing-system. But the only way I can open a support ticket is normally via their tech-support contact form on their website. At time's I've had an employee's email address, and once or twice they have opened a ticket for me. But once the ticket is opened, I have almost no visibility into its status. I receive no  i nfrequent  email updates, except if they close it, I might get an email telling me it closed. Otherwise unless a tech support employee voluntarily reaches out to me and provides a status update, I am completely in the dark. (they don't seem to add customer facing notes, so the info I can see about current tickets really gives me no real idea of whether anyone is really doing anything with it). This wouldn't be an issue if it seemed they were actually working on and fixing things. But when we've used the product for many months after opening some of these tickets, and literally ...

I am beginning my second season as a soccer league scheduler using the StackSports League Connect web-based scheduling system. We are required to use this system per our upstream affiliation with NMYSA who elected to move to StackSports due to the requirement from FIFA that all sanctioned/affiliated organizations use a software system that integrates with FIFA's player ID numbers. Apparently the prior system (LeagueOne from Active  Network) didn't meet this requirement. StackSports has some neat functionality, but also a lot of times many more clicks than LeagueOne to accomplish the same task. As the scheduler, I have run into many bugs & glitches. I've opened tickets for these, and to my knowledge only one of the 12+ bugs/defects I reported has been fixed. I believe that fix was a combination of: StackSports had to upgrade the size of server/capacity they were subscribing to in Amazon Web Services. There were some scripts that were created that either resolve...