Major server crash today - Please let me know if you run into any bugs

Today is one of those days I should have stayed in bed!

At first I thought a hacker may have gotten in as I got logged out of chat and when I (the mod) tried to go back in it said I was banned from chat!! (Some of you may have got this same error).

.. it was due to hard drive dying! Not fully dead but it was going out fast!!

It took HOURS to figure out what was going on and once I found the reason I had to restore the entire site (and that is a massive undertaking)

I restored it from a backup so some stuff may not be working as the backup transfer can "hiccup" at times and miss files. I fixed a couple already but please if you find something is not working or a page giving you an error please let me know.

I am just happy the site is back on for the weekend. I need to go have a sleep!!

Thanks mod! :D

Was starting to shake without my daily cerb fix :!:

That is why they invented RAID disk arrays. Drive dies and you do not care, server just keeps on running.

Not if the raid control is the cause of the problem ... but this was a single drive.

By the 3rd one, I figured there was some kind of cosmic convergence telling me to go outside and enjoy the sunshine instead of reading posts online.

 

They all came back at some point, then my PVR decided it didn't want to VR anymore last night.

Definitely a sign! Did you buy the lottery ticket ?!?

Ack, the trials and tribulations of being responsible for your own hosting and maintenance. Which is one of the reasons why I pretty much deploy and backup all my client projects and stuff to the cloud and/or VPS's. Of course, that's not foolproof but in my experience it's more hassle-free.

However, I can understand why Mod doesn't use those services, if I was in his shoes there's no way I would trust a third party with this site's data!

I'm not sure if this has anything to do with it, but I was asked to log in this morning. I thought it was strange since I am usually already logged in automatically without having to go through the process.

Sabrina, may not be related to the server- Mod indicated its a hardware issue.

Blackberrys will auto erase if someone enters the incorrect password beyond the allowed number (the max is 10). BB software is unforgiving, there is no way to recover, it is also its major benefit in keeping info private, should the unit be stolen (assumes you have the PW enabled).

Cerb would not infect a black berry as it was not hacked. If a hacker got in it is possible but highly unlikely... Normal virus's would not effect a black berry either it would need to be specific code designed for the black berry. So the chance of anyone hacking cerb to install some sort of black berry exploit is so unlikely I could not even imagine what the odds of that would be. Couple billion to one at least.

Since the crash I too have to login each time, where regardless of the status of the remember me check box.

E.S.T. Now that was weird, booted off at 1:13pm today July 20th logged back on, and then unable to see albums.

I had the same trouble as Pete.

I fixed it. The site tried to do a backup and the backup failed (it killed the picture tables in the database) I restored the picture tables and that seams to have fixed the problem.

a similar bug just now:

the total number of private messages is correct, but when I 'jump to folder' only a small fraction are shown..

Well that didn't work. I thought I had it fixed (it was fixed for a minute) but I was wrong ... It just started to happen all over again.

I managed to rebuild the photo albums it looks like that was to root of the problem. The images were being stored in the database and a few were corrupt from our crash the other day so I moved all the images into the file system and I hope that stops the errors... I hope people can upload photos however as I remember we had a different issue before when the images were stored in the file system...

I need to go for dinner so I will check back in a bit to see what new problems the site is having.

Again weird, it was like the time was set back, I lost pm's sent and received in the past hour or so, then lost about 5 posts posted in threads.

That is because I have had to restore the database a number of times. I apologize for this but can not be avoided.

We are STILL having issues with the photo system (So much so that we may loose it)

I can't figure out what is causing this and the system is crashing and really messing up the picture DB table. Really not many options left here.

Mod I don't care about the posts, I just hope the photo system remains in tact. Here's hoping and wishing!

Ok I think I have fixed the photos but I can't restore the pm's that were destroyed or the posts from earlier today unfortunately. I am not sure why the pms went missing and I hope nothing else is missing... I am very sorry but anything that is missing is probably gone.

I suspect it was the hardware error from the other day caused a chain of events that ended up coming to a head today ... Taking down the site.

I restored the site from the backup but the backup was not saving correctly as a few of the tables had errors still from the crash the other day... One being the photo table and one being the posts table.... While restoring those something (still not sure what) apparently killed off some pm's but I think what killed those pm's was the incomplete backup that I tried to restore from.

I tried to overlay the backup and that helped but it appears some posts and pms from earlier today and some previous stored pms have been lost. If I can find a way to restore them I sill.

Thanks for fixing this, mod.