Sorry for the loss of the site for the past few days. The server died on Saturday afternoon, and has required a completed replacement - not a single component of the old server is being used in the new one now running the site.

While almost the entire site was recovered from backups and the failing old hard drive a few gallery albums were lost - unfortunately I cannot recover those, and the owners will need to recreate them.

There might be a few quirks still, I'll be fixing them as I spot them. If you find any problems drop a post in the Helpdesk and I'll get onto them ASAP.

I'll be keeping a close eye on the new server, but it's now faster and more reliable than the previous one and puts us in a much better position to add new features - more news on that in the near future

Yay- its good to be back! thanks for all the hard work mate!

Keep up the good work!

-Rob

man it is good to be back.

cheers for all the hard work Dan!

~ Tim

And there was me thinking you were doing a scheduled update

Good to see AoS back up.. So will we be doing a donation drive to help to costs?
(prepares Passport and Plane Tickets)

It is good to be back. Thanks Dan.

I ended up talking to Lord Malek over the weekend. Thought something got broken in the cross-atlantic cable!

Good to see the site up and running again, good job Dan!

Looking forward to seeing your ideas for changes to the site.

TW

Yay and behold for it was said
What for and when where is the back up.. and lo did the mighty IT gods strike down upon those who did not save to floppy.

Well done on saving what you could..have you tried any of the way out there data recoevry things (I've got a bunch..one I haven't tried says it rotates the disks to mungle up any discrpancies (like rotating a tyre) I haven't had the need to try such desperate versions of back ups to try that particular one yet)

yes yes yes yes \o/\o/\o/ hurerah!!!! man i was lost there a second

Oh, I had a backup of the site (well, most of it). But a backup only goes so far when the hard drive is utter toast (and just as hot, I burnt myself touching it) and the entire OS needs to be reinstalled. I took the liberty of building a new server out of new parts and building a RAID1 array too, so a single drive failing won't blow the whole server away

The only things lost were a couple of gallery albums and a few images. The entire database for the site, and all the code were fine (the code being backed up automatically to another server earlier in the day, and the database files were recovered direct from the hard disk).

Do you and the folks who lost data know what it was.. or is it a kind of unknown unknowns (black swan kind of thing) that over time we'll slowly discover that X image in a folder Y was corrupted?

Glad to see the site back up. I was getting worried.

I can probably make a list of what was missing, given enough time to delve into the depths of the old hard drive with a recovery tool and making a list of all the files that come up as unreadable, but there were so few it's unlikely to be worth it. If anyone spots an error message in the gallery then let me know, but otherwise it shouldn't cause any problems - except that the random gallery image on the home page isn't working due to a corrupt file somewhere in the GBs of folders, but as we're moving to a new version very soon that will get sorted out in the short term anyway.

Huzzah!

Thought you had run out of 50ps for the metre!!!
Nice to be back thanks to you dan.
Cheers.

I only wish it was just the meter needing topping up, would have been a lot less hassle

...yeah, honestly, it went green and everything!

What, you mean to say no-one has been listening since Saturday???

Glad to be back, cheers all!!!

Good job Dan

timewizard wrote:I ended up talking to Lord Malek over the weekend.

Poor you. I bet no one was happier to see the site back up so you could talk to other people!

mattjgilbert wrote:Good job Dan

timewizard wrote:I ended up talking to Lord Malek over the weekend.

Poor you. I bet no one was happier to see the site back up so you could talk to other people!

We actually had a very nice email chat. We related some family info, steered away from rules discussions and debates.
Those topics we save for AoS!