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March 2003

Oekaki board back online
Site news, by Dr. Cossack on 27 March 2003 at 20:40

Now that the server has proven itself to be stable, and that I'm done with some other stuff, the oekaki board has been brought back online. More information about that is available in the announcements of the board.

Also, most sections of the site are now back online. Some more minor stuff left and right is still broken, but the hardest part is done. Within a week or two, all should be fine.

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The explanations
Site news, by Dr. Cossack on 11 March 2003 at 15:45

*pokes server* Seems to hold itself together... This site has been up and down for the last two weeks, and you might wonder what the heck happened. If that's the case, then keep on reading. If not, then you can just move on. However, don't start e-mailing me if you haven't read this post.

Here's a recap of everything that happened since last month. This should help you understand what went wrong.

February 21: My host runs a regular check on their servers. A SMART check for the hard drive says that it is in imminent failure (an estimated life of 33 days is given). They begin to prepare a server move before everything crashes.
February 23: The MySQL issues begin here, to last for about a week. This causes the message board, the oekaki and the news system (among others) to go down with either a "cannot connect" or "too many connections" error message.
March 2: After some failed attemps to lower MySQL usage (like removing the news script), my host decides to suspend my site due to overusage.
March 4: After two days of discussion, I manage to have them bring Interordi.com back online.
March 5: In order to avoid a crash, the server goes down to get it's hard drive change. In the process, my host restores a previous data backup. Since my site was suspended during that time, it gets suspended again (since it was restored from backup).
March 8: After some e-mail exchanges, I get my host to understand the above issue due to backup restoration. My site gets unsuspended.
March 9: It appears that the hardware problems weren't limited to the hard drive: they affect the whole server. My host then starts an emergency plan to move all sites to a different server. The server stats crashing every few hours due to those problems.
March 10: During the night, my host proceeds to move all sites (including this one, of course). However, the server fails completely, thus resulting in a DATA CRASH. 95% of the files on this site are lost.
March 11: I begin to restore the content of Interordi.com. It will take several days, if not a few weeks to get everything back on. Unlike last year though, I have near-complete backups (yes, I have all of the oekaki pictures), so the global downtime should be minimal.

Due to all of this, most sections are dead, and need fixing. Please don't start sending me e-mails asking "when is this section gonna be back online?", because I don't know! Also, there has been a period last week where e-mails couldn't get on the server. If you sent me an e-mail AND it bounced back, please send it again.

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Account suspended take 2
Site news, by Dr. Cossack on 8 March 2003 at 20:30

It appears that some more problems happened... The site has been down for about the whole week. After I posted the previous news item, my host ran into some problems on a server upgrade. Therefore, they reverted to a previous backup. However, said backup was done while my site was suspended. Therefore, I got suspended once again! It took me a few days of communications to make them understand that, but we're now back online! The harddrive has been changed too, so that shouldn't be an issue anymore. Hopefully, this will be the end of all those problems.

Some minor problems are still showing up left and right since we've resumed from that older backup. I'll fix those issues over the rest of the weekend. Thank you for your patience!

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Account suspended
Site news, by Dr. Cossack on 3 March 2003 at 19:00

You most probably noticed the "account suspended" message which plagued this website for over 24 hours. This wasn't caused by me not paying bills: I pay those as soon as I recieve them. That error was a follow-up of the several MySQL error messages (like the "Too many connections" one) which showed up for the last week: some script on my site went crazy, and kept crashing the database server. As a result, after a while, my host suspended my account. I had to contact them in order to gain back access. I still don't know for sure which script went crazy, but at least the main site is back online.

To prevent further MySQL problems, I've removed the news script powering up this page (I'm back on manual updating), and the oekaki board is down (it WILL come back). The message board is still running, though. I'll post more information as I get it.

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