New server news

[Broccoli]

Wow, that is a lot of windows! I usually have several open, but not that much!

Anyway, welcome, hoppy! Everything is going well on my computer!

[Augusta Longbottom]

holy cow...and I get confused with what I'm doing when I have just a handful of windows open...lol!

Seems to be working fine on my end. Thanks so much for all the effort and hard work you put into this site Paul!

[Gwared]

It only took 12 and a half minutes and yet I managed to come here when I couldn't get on!!

What are the odds?

Welcome Hoppy. 0th to you!!

And goodbye to lil' monster...thanks for the memories

[Paul]

Good to hear things are going well in everyone's different parts of the world. Yes, a fond farewell to Li'l Monster. She had a final bowl of Monster food and then headed toward the Enchanted Forest the last time I saw her.

[Paul]

Oh dear, I'm really sorry. It's not been a good past few days - as you may have read, posts made between about 3.00am friday morning and saturday night have been lost. I really feel awful about this as it's the first time we've lost over a whole solid days worth of posts, and it's entirely my fault - I really should have taken the time to do another backup immediately before the changes that I was trying to do on hoppy on saturday night.

For some reason, after trying to resize a couple of hoppy's partitions, hoppy failed to reboot. This shouldn't have been a major problem as my first test boot was into an old backup anyway on one of the size-changed partitions, and if this boot failed, hoppy should have automatically tried to boot into the normal live sytem. For some reason she didn't attempt the second boot though, so I had to contact the people who I lease hoppy from and ask them to manually reboot her. This should have got the live system working but the sever folks couldn't get things to boot at all, even trying different ways of getting things up and running. At that stage, the only real option was to wipe the server so that I could start reinstalling a backup on hoppy. After the wipe and installation of a new base system, I tried installing a new bootloader (lilo) and doing a test boot into the new base system, but again, total failure to boot.

I've now asked the server people to reinstall a new base system on hoppy yet again (in a slightly different partition configuration) and I'm waiting to see how things turn out. Once the new base system has been installed I'll try again - I'm still wondering why the boot failures have been happening, as I've double checked the configurations and I'm sure they should have worked.

If I get more failures it may be a case of going to yet another company (as unfortunately the server folks charge quite a bit for doing more than one reinstallation of the base system per month...something that wasn't clear when I signed up to them...they're doing the current second reinstallation for free thankfully but I'm worrying at the moment how many attempts it'll be before I find out what's going wrong) but wherever we go, reinstalling shouldn't take too long overall once the reboot problem has been solved.

Meanwhile, Li'l monster has kindly come out of the forest to help us whilst things are being sorted out one way or another with hoppy.

* Gives li'l monster a super-big bowl of monster food as thanks *

[Un'Anima Persa]

ooh, sounds too complicated for my taste...

im just glad hat its not shut down permanently. (we wont ahve to... will we?? )

yay for lil' monster!!!
*sits by hoppy's bed*

feel better, hoppy!


Oh, and Paul, I wont yell at you, i dont consider ti your fault... unless i should then........ then i guess i could yell if you wanted me to!!




lol j/k

but i hope all goes well, paul

best of luck to you, hoppy, and lil' monster over there!

-UAP

[Dutchess42]

Having been a webmaster at the mercy of hosting services I feel your pain.

So I will not SHOUT LOUDLY at you.

Ain't technology grand ??

[Broccoli]

oh, I'm glad the forum is back, I haven't been able open the page since Monday morning. Hope everything will settle down!

[Gwared]

Hehe, I like the deja vu of having the same PM's marked as new from Friday

[Paul]

lol at the deja vu - it's like BaO has gone through a time-turner!

Thanks for the positive posts - it's really appreciated. Hoppy's new base system has today been reinstalled by the server company and I've been able to "talk" to hoppy across this muggle internet technology thingummy tonight. I'll try in the next few days to get her fully up and running again. Don't worry, there's no way that BaO will be shut down permanently - it's my intention that the forum will be around as long as I can breath and type and organise a server to put the forum on, and I've no intention of stopping any of those three things....and even after that I hope it will continue too.

Part of what I was trying to do with hoppy when everything went wrong was to organise some space for backups as extra protection to ensure there's a total disaster never wipes out BaO. I've already got one backup scheme working but I'm intending to do at least 3 backups schemes - one daily on the server itself and 2 weekly off-server backups (on different days of the week).

If hoppy still has restarting (rebooting) problems, I'll lease the different server that I've been considering from another company where I should be able to do remote reinstallations myself. One way or another, we'll get back to a dedicated server as soon as possible.

[Snow_Crystal]

Hi Paul, being an IT Manager myself I feel your pain Like Dutchess42!

I am guessing that the server problem has also impacted on the Avatar's but I'm sure that's the least of your worries at the moment!

Good luck with the rest of the work and by the way thank you!!! I'm sure everyone on here really appreciates the work you're putting in on it - I know I certainly do!

Ooh by the way, thanks for setting me up with a new title!!

[Scarlet Lioness]

I just got on today...Well it's Wednesday night at the moment...so It took quite a while for me, and It was down since Sunday...well Saturday for most people...

Glad It's back...

[selene]

i'm glad it's back too

it's wednesday afternoon here and i was starting to worry


(and ofcourse i look at a time when i don't have a lot of time)

[Paul]

Good to know we've got a couple of fellow computery-type people here. It is certainly true that sometimes I do feel partly at the mercy of hosting providers. I've though a couple of times about running a server from home but the upload speed on ADSL is a maximum of 256Kbs here (at least with my current ADSL provider - I'm not sure but think that may be a general maximum in the UK). That would mean slow connections for members and visitors to the forum and my sites, so I won't use that option unless there's no other viable choice, at least not whilst the upload speeds stay at that maximum rate.

The avatars are still saved on the entire server backup that was done last Friday morning - sorry I hadn't restored them here on Li'l monster...I'll try to get them uploaded by tomorrow at the latest.

Sorry about the problems in accessing the forum today too. Li'l monster decided to crash her database program early this morning. Just a few days and she's having tantrums already - ah well, good to know we can rely on her not to change.

[Paul]

Weeeeheee hoppy is back to full health again! Thanks to everyone who visited and sat by hoppy in the hospital wing...I think she really appreciated all your thoughts. She's should actually be stronger and healthier than before as I've updated her to the latest kernel (effectively the heart of her operating system), and all her additional software parts have been updated to the latest stable versions too.

So it'll be a fond farewell to Li'l monster again in a few hours time, and Li'l monster will be able to go back to her home in the Enchanted Forest once more, as hoppy takes over the magical technicalities of enabling BaO to be viewed on the interweb thingummy. I'll be temporarily shutting down the forum later tonight or early tomorrow morning (depending on your location), so that the database can be bundled by Li'l monster and given to hoppy.

Based on how long it took last time, it may only be a quarter of an hour for the handover to take place, although the time before you can access BaO on hoppy willl depend on how fast the change percolates through the internet. Once the changes have filtered through, you'll then be able to reach the forum here at BaO using the trusty http://www.broomsticksandowls.com/forum address.

Thanks to everyone for their patience, and see you at hoppy!

* Gives Li'l monster and hoppy a very big bowl of monster food each. *