Major Site Problems - Please Read!!!
Posted: Fri Sep 23, 2011 10:33 pm
G’day All,
Well I think most of you know the site has been down from Tuesday morning until about 6pm this evening and I guess you would like to know what went wrong so I will try and make this as short as possible.
At first it was thought that our host server was being hacked but that was later found not to be the case. The host server was running two hard drives, the main one we were operating off of and a backup one. Apparently there was no monitoring system on these drives (the real cause of the problems) and at some unknown time the main hard drive died so we were operating off the backup drive until it too decided to die which caused our outage.
Of course with no backup drive they had no backup files. Our hosts tried to retrieve the site files but they were unable to; everything lost!!! I was kinda feeling rather stressed by this stage.
However, after what happened a few months ago with TBGA site etc I decided to learn how to do my own backing up of the forum onto my own computer and I am so glad I did. I was able to eventually upload my backup file to the server but the hosts had all sorts of problems trying to use the backup to restore the site but eventually they succeeded tonight. My last backup was done on the 11th of September and the site has been restored to what it was like on that date; well sort of.
Although we have the forums up I see we have a lot of problems still. For some reason no attachments have been restored and this is a major concern and has to be looked into ASAP and there are numerous other little glitches.
Being the weekend you may not see any changes until next week. Some of the more minor glitches with the forum I will have to try and fix and to be honest I haven’t a clue on how to do some of them as I am lacking when it comes to the tech side of things so please bear with me as I try and get things sorted again.
While I am annoyed and extremely disappointed that this could/did happen, it has so we need to fix it as best we can and move on. My hosts have been very helpful through all of this and have tried their best to get the site back up as soon as they could - there were quite a number of other sites on the same server so they had a lot of work to do.
So folks as you can see things aren’t ideal but we are at least back up and active again. I ask that you please be patient as I try and sort everything out and if you are having any specific problems please contact me. I am sorry for any inconvenience this outage has caused but it was certainly beyond my control.
Thanks
Jeff
Well I think most of you know the site has been down from Tuesday morning until about 6pm this evening and I guess you would like to know what went wrong so I will try and make this as short as possible.
At first it was thought that our host server was being hacked but that was later found not to be the case. The host server was running two hard drives, the main one we were operating off of and a backup one. Apparently there was no monitoring system on these drives (the real cause of the problems) and at some unknown time the main hard drive died so we were operating off the backup drive until it too decided to die which caused our outage.
Of course with no backup drive they had no backup files. Our hosts tried to retrieve the site files but they were unable to; everything lost!!! I was kinda feeling rather stressed by this stage.
However, after what happened a few months ago with TBGA site etc I decided to learn how to do my own backing up of the forum onto my own computer and I am so glad I did. I was able to eventually upload my backup file to the server but the hosts had all sorts of problems trying to use the backup to restore the site but eventually they succeeded tonight. My last backup was done on the 11th of September and the site has been restored to what it was like on that date; well sort of.
Although we have the forums up I see we have a lot of problems still. For some reason no attachments have been restored and this is a major concern and has to be looked into ASAP and there are numerous other little glitches.
Being the weekend you may not see any changes until next week. Some of the more minor glitches with the forum I will have to try and fix and to be honest I haven’t a clue on how to do some of them as I am lacking when it comes to the tech side of things so please bear with me as I try and get things sorted again.
While I am annoyed and extremely disappointed that this could/did happen, it has so we need to fix it as best we can and move on. My hosts have been very helpful through all of this and have tried their best to get the site back up as soon as they could - there were quite a number of other sites on the same server so they had a lot of work to do.
So folks as you can see things aren’t ideal but we are at least back up and active again. I ask that you please be patient as I try and sort everything out and if you are having any specific problems please contact me. I am sorry for any inconvenience this outage has caused but it was certainly beyond my control.
Thanks
Jeff