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IMPORTANT PLEASE READ

Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 1:57 pm
by Natedawgg
DO NOT POST host has replaced hard disk and not restored the correct version of our website. Firejack is locked out of admin panel at this in time


message from firejack

Re: IMPORTANT PLEASE READ

Posted: Fri Jan 11, 2008 12:19 am
by Fennris
D'oh!

Re: IMPORTANT PLEASE READ

Posted: Fri Jan 11, 2008 1:50 am
by Firejack
Bah you people are hopeless. I get Adam to put this message up in caps and you post anyhow :P

Well at a glance everything seems to be working ok now, so feel free to post. I'll check in the morning when I'm not so tired!

Re: IMPORTANT PLEASE READ

Posted: Fri Jan 11, 2008 7:59 am
by AmigaFan2003
I thought he meant something like don't post asking why the websites been scuppered lately!

Re: IMPORTANT PLEASE READ

Posted: Fri Jan 11, 2008 9:15 am
by Callie
So will u get something from the company for all the server down time?

Re: IMPORTANT PLEASE READ

Posted: Fri Jan 11, 2008 10:34 am
by Firejack
Hard Disks go bad. Nothing you can do about that. I think for what we pay 1 day offline isn't unreasonable. Sure its been annoying but looking at the quality of the restoration job, setting our site up on the new Hard Disk from the backup, I'm more then happy.

Re: IMPORTANT PLEASE READ

Posted: Fri Jan 11, 2008 10:48 am
by Theodora
yeh, as long as this doesn;t become a habit or anything then it's nothing to worry about :)

Re: IMPORTANT PLEASE READ

Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2008 5:25 pm
by Firejack
A couple of people are still asking about what happened this week. So to avoid repeating myself again, here is what happened.

As most of you will have noticed. Since the weekend the website hasn't been very reliable at all. The hosting company for the website identified a failing hard disk (yes third time his has happened to us!).

On Wednesday it got a lot worse with the website slow most of the day then offline most of the evening. When it did come back online it wasn't working properly giving MySQL errors.

Thursday morning the web hosting company took down the web server to replace the hard disk. Which was complete by about 13:00 and data was restored to the site around 13:40.

For what seemed a bizarre reason at the time they restored an old version of the website first. Approximately 4 weeks old, yet it had a current version of the site database (guess the database runs on another server). This is why some people were able to log into the forums as they hadn't changed their forum style from the first choice they made. Everyone else was locked out, including me, as the default forum style wasn't available.

Instead of messing around with the database for the forum and to stop the old configuration of the website, which I'd heavily modified during the Christmas holiday, causing problems. I decided to lock the site with a password while I tried to find out why such an old version of the site was live.
This become clear when I found out our hosts were using a very impressive incremental backup system which even though it took awhile to restore produced an exact copy of the site before it went offline for the hard disk to get changed. Which I'm highly impressed by as normally in this situation you'd expect some missing files, old files reappearing, missing forum posts, incorrect file permissions but there was none of this.

When the incremental back up had finally finished restoring all the data on the web server it overwrote the password protection on the site which caught me off guard a bit as I didn't noticed the site reopen to give me a chance to check it. But I have done now and everything is perfect.

The web server got upgraded and all testing indicates this is lightning fast now so we should of seen the end to those time out issues, blank pages or downtime 8)

Re: IMPORTANT PLEASE READ

Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2008 5:41 pm
by Callie
Sounds great fj, but i know what really happend to the server.
THIS!!!

And here they come and say it was a harddrive crashing..im so on to them :redx:

Re: IMPORTANT PLEASE READ

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2008 5:34 pm
by Darkarium
Talk about wall of text...

Re: IMPORTANT PLEASE READ

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2008 7:39 pm
by AmigaFan2003
No, this is a wall of text:-

Image

Re: IMPORTANT PLEASE READ

Posted: Tue Jan 15, 2008 10:19 pm
by Firejack
Seems a memory module failed in the server tonight. And now there are some DNS issues as a result of the emergency maintenance to replace the memory earlier.

Hopefully everything will be working soon. Hope they have a new hard disk ready though..

cPanel: Disk /dev/sda7 (/home) 96 % :S

Re: IMPORTANT PLEASE READ

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 2:13 pm
by Alastriona
I hope this is just a one time thing, but it seems alot of hardware is failing with our host.

Re: IMPORTANT PLEASE READ

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 4:42 pm
by prinses
didnt something similar happen before on the other host?
is fj cursed? :eeeek:

Re: IMPORTANT PLEASE READ

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 4:57 pm
by Firejack
We had 2 hard disks failures on our previous host. One almost wiped out the site but I was able to grab a backup a few hours before it died.
The second time I saw a similar problem develop so quickly moved our site off the server to avoid it being lost.

There doesn't appear to be any risk to the website with our new host. The backup system is very good. Just the inconvenience of it really which is frustrating.