EVERYONE READ: What happened to the forum?

We did an extensive check of all the recovered databases and besides the huge amount of missing users and the unread post notifications, there’s only a couple missing posts being reported here and there. I am thinking of archiving this into a read-only forum and starting another new one though if things get too messy.

As for what happened, this was basically a clusterf*** of hardware failures and user errors that all happened at the exact same time, plus a double software failure – it failed, and didn’t report that it failed. One in a million chances probably of all this happening at the same time.

We were being hosted on a RAID 10 array with several drives, so it was mirrored and striped. If one drive went, the others would take over with reduced performance until the bad drive could be replaced. What happened here was after the drive failed, a technician replaced it with a new drive, which ended up being DOA. The RAID controller assumed it was a good drive and began mirroring null data onto the other drives into the array. If the drive had been tested prior to installation this would not have even happened. Fortunately it was noticed and stopped very quickly. Since this was a shared hosting platform with other clients on it, I was not the only one affected and many lost more than I did, some lost everything.

As for the private messaging problems that have been going on, I don’t think it was related to what I described above. We updated phpbb recently and it may have screwed up permissions. I have my Website Team looking in to it right now. phpbb permissions can get a bit wonky sometimes.

I’m back! It’s been a busy week so I haven’t had time to figure out how to get back on here until tonight. I’m guessing my profile was one of the ones that got wiped out because I was unable to log in with my username and password when I saw the forum come back up. The only way I could seem to get that back in here was re-register under the same user name. But of course that wiped out my post counts and profile.

Couple of things, and maybe that’s because I’m now a “new user” but it doesn’t look like I can upload pictures anymore to a thread. Or even add a profile picture. Did something change or has that option not been restored yet?

Never mind, looks like this is working now. Maybe I needed to make that first post or wait a couple of minutes for that to start working. Unless an admin fixed that, then thanks!

Glad to see you return, Lambda!

IT’S ALIVE! :open_mouth:

Welcome Back, Lambda!

Welcome back, Lambda! I love the Futurama reference.

Welcome back! Also that avatar is funny :3.

I had an issue with file system permissions for the directory where uploaded avatars and photos are saved, but I fixed that.

Yeah, I have a small problem, although mine is only like 8% filled.

I hadn’t been on the forums for a while but went to check on April 1 and thought it was just a prank

Just glad we are back up and running again :smiley:

Voluntary denial of service is not a prank. It’s a stupid thing to do.
I guarantee this was not voluntary.

If anything, it’s laziness. If they had checked the new part, this most likely wouldn’t have happened. My claim is based on what you told us, of course.

People make mistakes. You don’t know what the circumstances were, so you can’t lay blame.

Um, I think the original post tells us the circumstances?

Don’t know if this is related to the crash but I am unable to upload images to any posts. The prompts are there, and I can start to upload the image (the progress bar even turns half green), but then I get an error message:

Error
Could not upload attachment to ./files/[RANDOM CHARACTERS}

(I’ve withheld the information after “/files/” in case that is specific to my account)

Tried different images with no success.

I ran into that “unable to upload” on an image too. I had to load the image externally and link to it. Probably a permissions adjustment is needed somewhere.

3rd.

1 Like