Server failure thread Sep-2019

[davem]

Hi folks, as in the announcement:

Originally Posted by The Announcement

Hello All,

I'm sure you noticed we've been offline for several days. Our server experience a major hardware failure and our host had quite a battle getting us moved to new hardware.

They got us back online briefly today, 27-Sep-2019, but our backup was from 9/21 and we had some error messages on many pages.

I got rid of the error messages, then restored a newer backup and our image attachments from my latest backup (9/23/19 at about 4:45 a.m)

From what I can tell the server crashed sometime on 9/24 prior to my 4:45 backup so we lost about a day of content. I sincerely apologize for that.

Moving forward, we are going to migrate to a new type of virtual server "on the cloud". The advantage is that if something fails we can instantly come back up on a different server almost instantly. That's the theory anyway. I think it's our best path forward in hopes to avoid this type of catastrophic failure.

If you see any error messages or anything else strange, please post here. Please note the url of the page where you see the problem. For instance, as I type this I am at https://www.johnbridge.com/vbulletin...=newthread&f=5.

Again, I appreciate your help and patience.

[Kman]

You know, every time this happens, I have to do some work around the house.

You'd think the guys that handle our server would keep that in mind.....

[Dave Taylor]

Ya'll had me worried for a bit.

[John Bridge]

Who me, worry?

Worry doesn't quite describe it. The web site is my life. It's been around since the 1990s. We have done everything we knew how to do up to this point to keep things humming, and, as it turns out, it wasn't enough.

In the early years, after outgrowing the usual hosting services, we moved to a virtual dedicated server. After causing it to break down a time or two we moved to a leased dedicated server, and we've had to upgrade to a larger one of those. Now I guess we broke that somehow.

I can't wait to get on that cloud.

[Gozo]

Hey Dave,
It seems the apostrophes from the historical backups are getting converted to weird characters. The current post, like John?s above look OK.
Take a look at this for an example:
https://www.johnbridge.com/vbulletin...ostcount=21670

When I looked at this post in preview, it looks OK; but in the thread, the apostrophe shows as a ?. Also, the linked post, is OK in the single post view, but weird in the thread.
Maybe it’s just my browser.

[chuck stevenson]

Glad ya'll and all got this issue sorted out. I tried logging in the other day and got nothing.

[davem]

Thank you Jeff, I will look into it.

Edit: I made a change and the historic post you linked looks ok, but I still see a ? in your post above.

Interesting, Chuck's "ya'll" looks ok....

Ah, I think I know what happened. Chuck posted right after I made the change so his is ok. Your's shows a ? When I edit it, and I see you edited it. So I think going forward all posts with apostrophes will be ok. I hope.

[Tiger Mountain Tile Inc]

That's a big outage! Glad you guys got things up and running again.

[Tiger Mountain Tile Inc]

I think I just found a bug:

I'm showing that I have 1 notification below my user name in the upper right. A private message.

When I go to click on the message it shows a box about 1 inch lower than the notification. When I move the mouse down to click the box it disappears.

edit: I just uploaded a screen shot. This is on Chrome.

[Gozo]

Looks like whatever you’ve done in the restore process has fixed the odd character issue I mentioned in post #5. Looked at a few of the offending examples and they look good now. Thanks for the heroic effort!

[davem]

Jeff

Jim, I just sent myself a private message. I see the notice and also get the popup when I click it. I click on the popup and it takes me to the message.

Is anyone else seeing what Jim is seeing?

[cx]

PM feature working fine on my end, Dave, when the site is working fine, which is still not always after the big outage.

[John Bridge]

I vote we far DaveM. It's all gotta be his fault.

[Dave Taylor]

DaveM is pretty "far" already.

[Tiger Mountain Tile Inc]

Seems to be working now. The box is now right below the notification box and I can mouse over it.

Good work, Dave!