Hello everyone,
Whew, that truly was a close one.
In the early morning hours of Feb 12, the server said its last goodbye for hosting this site. At approximately 2:00am EST on the 12th, the server crashed, and she crashed hard.
The server host was alerted, which they in turn were able to reboot the server after several hours of repair. The first thing they did after getting the server up and running was to PERMANENTLY disable our forum software.
No email, no phone call, nothing. It wasn't until around 7:00am on the 12th that we even realized the server was down and that the forum software was disabled.
After talking with them, they assured us that they would not EVER allow us to enable the software again. Their exact words to us were "you have got to be kidding, right."
Unfortunately, without the software running, we had no way of exporting the forum database, which means we would lose all of our post, polls, member data, everything...
Since we couldn't talk them in to enabling it just for 30 minutes or so, we had to figure a way of getting the database .tar'ed and exported. The only solution we could come up with was to actually install another board on the same server, and manually port the paths to the old database by hand. All this while trying not to throw up any hard server load which would cause them to put a stop to it.
8 hours into our recovery attempt, the last of the database had been exported and the old software was terminated. Our problem then was finding a server to move to until our dedicated server is prepared.
We contacted the OLD server host that we use to be on, asking for them to lend a hand. After much conversation, we were able to talk them into allowing us to restart the old software and import the newer database. But, it did come with some compromises.
Our database import was over 49 Megs. They asked us to trim that down and try to hit something reasonable around 10 Megs. In an effort to get the forums back up and running again, we began the tedious task of sifting through the database, deleting all posts and polls older than 30 days. This trimmed the post amounts by 20,000 and allowed us to hit their target of 10 Megs.
We then did a clean install of the forum software, uploaded the newer (trimmed) database and imported it. We then modified each and every file that we made custom mods to, uploaded them, then launched the software.
ERROR:
That's all we saw after that. It seems that the newer version clean install of the forum software had a compatability issue with its previous version that prevented the importing of the database completely.
To make a long story short, it took many, many hours of tweaking and prodding to get the database to load. We finally had a successful import that the forum software liked.
Since we did a clean install of the software, there are a few things that still don't work. We are aware of items such as the calendar, etc., that have issues. We are working to correct those as soon as possible.
The new features, etc., that we have briefly mentioned in the past will NOT be made available for this software while it is on this server. We will wait until everything is moved to the dedicated server to save us some time and effort.
Speaking of the dedciated server, our last conversation with the NEW server host estimates that our dedicated line will be finished being built sometime today, at which time we will begin loading the server software we need for the site. We anticipate migration to the new dedicated server sometime next week.
Once again I would like to apologize to everyone for the inconvienence that was caused. We sincerely appreciate the patience and professionalism that each and every one of you have demonstrated. We received only helpful emails, none that were derrogatory.
Thanks again.
Whew, that truly was a close one.
In the early morning hours of Feb 12, the server said its last goodbye for hosting this site. At approximately 2:00am EST on the 12th, the server crashed, and she crashed hard.
The server host was alerted, which they in turn were able to reboot the server after several hours of repair. The first thing they did after getting the server up and running was to PERMANENTLY disable our forum software.
No email, no phone call, nothing. It wasn't until around 7:00am on the 12th that we even realized the server was down and that the forum software was disabled.
After talking with them, they assured us that they would not EVER allow us to enable the software again. Their exact words to us were "you have got to be kidding, right."
Unfortunately, without the software running, we had no way of exporting the forum database, which means we would lose all of our post, polls, member data, everything...
Since we couldn't talk them in to enabling it just for 30 minutes or so, we had to figure a way of getting the database .tar'ed and exported. The only solution we could come up with was to actually install another board on the same server, and manually port the paths to the old database by hand. All this while trying not to throw up any hard server load which would cause them to put a stop to it.
8 hours into our recovery attempt, the last of the database had been exported and the old software was terminated. Our problem then was finding a server to move to until our dedicated server is prepared.
We contacted the OLD server host that we use to be on, asking for them to lend a hand. After much conversation, we were able to talk them into allowing us to restart the old software and import the newer database. But, it did come with some compromises.
Our database import was over 49 Megs. They asked us to trim that down and try to hit something reasonable around 10 Megs. In an effort to get the forums back up and running again, we began the tedious task of sifting through the database, deleting all posts and polls older than 30 days. This trimmed the post amounts by 20,000 and allowed us to hit their target of 10 Megs.
We then did a clean install of the forum software, uploaded the newer (trimmed) database and imported it. We then modified each and every file that we made custom mods to, uploaded them, then launched the software.
ERROR:
That's all we saw after that. It seems that the newer version clean install of the forum software had a compatability issue with its previous version that prevented the importing of the database completely.
To make a long story short, it took many, many hours of tweaking and prodding to get the database to load. We finally had a successful import that the forum software liked.
Since we did a clean install of the software, there are a few things that still don't work. We are aware of items such as the calendar, etc., that have issues. We are working to correct those as soon as possible.
The new features, etc., that we have briefly mentioned in the past will NOT be made available for this software while it is on this server. We will wait until everything is moved to the dedicated server to save us some time and effort.
Speaking of the dedciated server, our last conversation with the NEW server host estimates that our dedicated line will be finished being built sometime today, at which time we will begin loading the server software we need for the site. We anticipate migration to the new dedicated server sometime next week.
Once again I would like to apologize to everyone for the inconvienence that was caused. We sincerely appreciate the patience and professionalism that each and every one of you have demonstrated. We received only helpful emails, none that were derrogatory.
Thanks again.
