Down Time
 

I want to apologized for the downtime that Programming Forums has just experienced. I am also sorry to say that our new servers were being hacked and that in trying to stop the server from being taken down, the database did get lost. We have lost the last 3 days worth of data and changes to PFO. Dani has reassured me that she will be working non stop until she gets everything back to the way it was, and she is very sorry for what has happened. She will pull as many all-nighters as it takes to get things going smoothly again. Once again Dani and I apologized for any inconvenience this has caused any of you. I am hoping that nobody here will let this little problem affect how they see Dani, as she was very upset that this happened and called me crying to tell me what had happened.

During the migration period, making backups of the database had fallen through the cracks, but now a cron has been setup to take a backup of the database every 12 hours. So this will never happen again. Again I apologize to everyone for the inconvenience this has caused. Thanks

Re: Down Time
 

I just want to quickly step in and say how absolutely upset I am. I was literally balling to Kyle on the phone a little while ago, and I'm still shaking and sick to my stomach. I promise you that this isn't any type of normal occurrence ... I promise! I pulled three allnighters in a row, all weekend long, working on PFO, and I am committed to pulling another three allnighters in a row to fixing it. Not only that, but I had paid a thousand dollars to attend a seminar (it's nonrefundable) in the city all day today, and I am not going just that I can work on making this right as fast as possible. I promise you that I am dedicated and committed to the PFO community. That said, please expect me to not be around the next day or so as I work furiously behind the scenes. I will try to check in with regular status updates, however.

Re: Down Time
 

That would explain why posts went missing, among other things. Who maintains the servers? You guys seemed to have been moving pretty fast through the transition process to have missed making sure data backups were operational. Is it possible to mirror PFO to another server, for development purposes? I came in a few times and things were shuffled around a bit, so I punched out for a while.

Hopefully, the changes to PFO were stored in another location... I would hate for you all to go through the same modifications again. The loss of data is bad, but I don't think it was that big of a dent... those with pending questions will more than likely repost if their query was hammered. With third-party hosting, some levels of security are really out of your hands... but may want to define some sort of feasible disaster recovery plan in the event this happens again.

I'm going to sit relatively idle for a while until things get stablized. But I'll be lurking about. :)

Re: Down Time
 

The servers are maintained by DaniWeb's system administrator, as PFO is now running on the same server cluster as DaniWeb. (Not to point fingers or anything, but backups are the responsibility of our sysadmin, whom I've been working with for years and years and implicitely trust but am very frustrated with right now. Grr!)

A version of PFO *was* on a development server but the database was a couple of days old ... When the live database got corrupt, we ended up restoring from the version that I was using for feature testing on the development server.

Backups are made once per day but, unfortunately, our sysadmin just hadn't yet gotten around to setting up the PFO backup script since we stopped working with the development database and started working with the live database. The backup cron script has since been set up today.

Re: Down Time
 

> Hopefully, the changes to PFO were stored in another location... I would hate for you all to go through the same modifications again.

They weren't. That's exactly what I am going to be up all night doing. To reiterate, I want to fly down to Texas and smack our sysadmin right about now.

Re: Down Time
 

That definitely sucks cscgal... bad timing for sure. I think I'd be breaking a few sysadmin fingers myself if it were my code that was lost.

Take your time in getting things resolved and don't stress out too terribly much... in the end, things will work out and what made us a community will keep us a community.

Re: Down Time
 

Wow that really sucks. I was kinda getting used to the new forum layout and everything too.

I might have come off a little hard in the beginning, but I'm beginning to realize PFO could have been sold to someone who would merge the forum with another, and things could be a lot worse.

I appreciate all your hard work cscgal!

Re: Down Time
 

Thank you so much for all of your support. Not knowing what the community response would be like made it all the more stressful, because I was literally terrified of being flamed again.

I have just completed recreating the portal homepage, and it's now live. In a few minutes I'm going to run into the shower because I literally haven't moved since I woke up this morning. Hopefully I'll then feel more refreshed and more productive.

Re: Down Time
 

Working from home... now I'm jealous. :P

Re: Down Time
 

Most people run forums as hobbies. I run DaniWeb fulltime. PFO is my new hobby.