LibriumArcana.Games

What happened with the forums last night? It appears as if the admins here had to restore from an old backup.

Long story short...
The hosting company lost the DBs.
There's a restore of everything..
Except the blogs, themes...and userDB.

I'm not sure how you lost specific tables out of an entire DB.

Yeah, I got lazy on the backups too, so the users and forums are restored off my last good one... which is from November.

But the posts seem to be there up to about last week, so that's good. The index is going to look like how it did last nov though until we manually fix that.

I'm working on getting what I have back up now. The board may go down temporarily again during this time, so don't be alarmed if it does.

www.phpwebhosting.com charges a flat $10 a month, and I can vouch that they always have competent network & server admins on hand.

Just saying.

Today's quiet(er) at work, so I think I can stir up the inspiration to recreate my big dramatic posts in the various FRPG's here.

Between Destructinator and I we've got it more or less up and running again.

I was starting in with crude coding hacks when he came in with an old restore to replace the info in those tables, which is great, let me tell you!

I'm also talking to our wonderful hosts to see if we can get a restore tried again to see if we can get a newer restore maybe so we won't have lost 11 days worth of posts.

However, once we've gotten everything working again I'm doing an entire site backup to my hard drive, databases and all. It will be written to DVD and stored safely for a rainy day.

B4UTRUST wrote:However, once we've gotten everything working again I'm doing an entire site backup to my hard drive, databases and all. It will be written to DVD and stored safely for a rainy day.

Awesome.

If you've shell access, perhaps a shell script to automate backups of the SQL tables and site file data (including forum files) might be of some use - that way all you have to do is FTP in (or scp, if your host allows it) and grab the files every night.

SSH was closed off a while ago. I prefer to use it for all management tasks, but now the server just kicks me out when I connect. Annoying, but not enough where I felt like bitching about it to Scott to bitch about to the hosts.

Oh, there's going to be some *SERIOUS* bitching going on now...

Anything else you want turned on besides SSH access?

And is there any way other then SSH to set it to do an automatic weekly or daily database backup to a remote site or something?

Oh, user-selectable themes restored.

subBlack was set to override user settings. Bastard thing. Adam found it a few seconds before I did.

Destructionator XV wrote:SSH was closed off a while ago.

B4UTRUST wrote:Oh, there's going to be some *SERIOUS* bitching going on now...

Good. Call me a purist, but lack of SSH access into one's web host is pure heresy.

B4UTRUST wrote:And is there any way other then SSH to set it to do an automatic weekly or daily database backup to a remote site or something?

Writing the shell script yourself and uploading it via FTP yourself with the proper permissions I guess, but executing it or cron-jobbing it would still be problematic.

B4UTRUST wrote:And is there any way other then SSH to set it to do an automatic weekly or daily database backup to a remote site or something?

Yes; writing a script to pull it from the web interface should be easy enough, but brute-forcish compared to a pretty ssh (and will eat more bandwidth, but 40 MB a week (the compressed db) isn't really that bad if you ask me)

There should be a way to cron it or something on the server too, but I'm not sure how trivial it would be to get the data off-site with that method.

...We have 50gb a month of bandwidth.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that we don't need to worry about eating bandwidth...

So, just so I'm clear on this - are the posts from the past x days outright gone for good?

since our host does not have a more recent backup and neither do we, I'm going to say, yes...

B4UTRUST wrote:since our host does not have a more recent backup and neither do we, I'm going to say, yes...

...Bah, humbug. Well, thank you to all those who got the forums to working order again, at least.

A few bugs, just in case they haven't been noticed yet (though I realize I'm most likely posting these purely for posterity):

- the DB table for Private messages is either missing, or...something. Either way, attempting to view PM's returns a Debug Mode error.
UPDATE: Clicking the PM link on a post opens the Compose PM page without issue, but when sent, returns the error "Sorry, no such user exists," thus referring back to the missing tables error when attempting to view existing PM's directly.

- A relatively minor thing: user's postcounts (at least in my case, perhaps with others) appear to be off.

- There are more forum themes than before. Awesome.

- Another non-urgent issue: the Kitchen Stadium forum lacks a description as well as a moderator.

===

I hope these help, at least somewhat. If I'm merely preaching to the choir here, its mostly because work is rather slow today, and Websense is spoiling most of my time-wasting Intarweb-based fun.

Kitchen Stadium hasn't been described or moderated yet because it was just added to get the posts back in a feeble hope that we still could. It will be corrected once everything settles down.

Themes - there were a bunch on the list that I had uploaded at some point or other and just clicked select all>install to try to get us more theme usage in the beginning then subBlack

Postcounts - yeah, they're off due to missing posts that are now back or posts that are no longer here or the fact that the user table was pulled from an older archive then the rest of the board so it may not match up. This is a very minor issue all things considered.

Private Messages - there's a high chance that this table will have to be completely rebuilt from scratch or an older backup if possible if adam has it. If not we'll rebuild it and we've lost our PMs. Sorry. All told though this is a relatively minor loss, although I do admit even I had some PMs that I had wanted saved. *will never see Dan Johnson's praise of his paranoia game again *

Holy fuck we have a lot of private messages in the db. There are about 4,000 by my estimate in the November backup! (which is being restored now, and edit: is done.)

Oh, and btw, thanks for getting ssh back. That would have taken aeons to do and transfer through the web interface.

Overall...this entire affair has been annoying...

and I swear to the Gods....if the hosts keep fucking with the server again, I think we may have to find someone new....

there's no "may." We need to start looking for a new one. Two major outages in the last month and the loss of our databasae setting back over a week. I would say that is entirely unacceptable.

I found one last night, was talking to Adam about it.

I'll talk to you today.

Again, just to throw this out there - http://www.phpwebhosting.com is the best web hosting company I've ever found. I recommend it to everyone who is in the market for an all-around excellent web hosting provider.

And no, they don't pay me to say that.

yes but I'm trying to find something a bit cheaper then $120 a year. We're paying $60 right now a year.

I found a couple of hosts which will fit our needs. Nothing against phpwebhosting.com, but they don't say if they include SSH, and they don't have the Cpanel and Fantastico control panels we've been using on the site (it makes for me, at least, things easier when I go into the back end for everything but file transfers).

I'm looking over a couple right now, honestly, I'm willing to pay for good hosting, as long as they won't pull the crap our current provider is. I curse the day admhosting got sold to axishosting.....

HostGator looks to be like what admhosting used to be, and they got a nice boost in bandwidth and disc space.....