Sorry for the downtime

[Paul]

Yay, the strangely odd-characters problem has been solved! Full info of the mystery of the Deranged Debugs and the Technical Thingummies that defeated them is in the Debug? thread.

[Simatra]

Debugging huh? Sounds serious .....

I'm hyper and I'm not sure why, nice to see the problem is fixed.

[Paul]

I'm hyper and I'm not sure why,

Uh-oh - I forgot about the label on the Doxycide I used for the Debugs:

Warning - Doxycide can have dangerous effects and should only be used in well-aerated areas .

* Quickly runs around opening every window as wide as it can go *

[Paul]

I've just realised that the time on the forum is a bit off again, and is currently about 2 hours ahead...'tis a forum that sees into the future!. I think hoppy was shut down for a short while over the last couple of days as I received an unexpected email yesterday saying I'd rebooted hoppy (which was a surprise to me as I hadn't told her to shut down and restart at all ).

The company where hoppy is housed does seem to have had some power problems over the last month, caused by two 80Amp fuses (wooow, powerful!) blowing at hoppy's home on the server farm, so I guess it could be something to do with that (although the last thing I heard the electrical folk had increased the fuses to 100Amps which was thought to fix things).

I'll get the clock back to the right time over the next few days - it may be that I'll need to do it bit by bit at quiet times, because if someone posts and the forum sees that the time has gone backwards, the forum's flood control won't allow the same person to post again until the time is a few seconds after the initial post.

[GodrictheGriffon]

That's almost funny. It's like we all have time-turners or something and we're all going on a roller-coaster.

[Paul]

Weeeheee - BaO is back. I could hardly believe what happened.....for anyone who didn't read my post in this thread from Sunday 8th June, hoppy, the server, had a bit of a problem with a partition on her had drive on Friday 6th June which caused the forum to lock and die. I ended up effectively reformatting the affected partition on the hard drive and completed recovering things from a backup on Sunday. All was nice and good again.

Then, totally unrelated, on Monday 9th June I found that a hacker (probably a hacking bot) had successfully gained access to hoppy early on that Monday morning....it also had returned that afternoon when the hacker (or bot) was here it had full "root" access...it downloaded to hoppy some unknown programs and ran them...I don't know everything they did but for one thing they stopped me from logging in to hoppy by ssh. Although people have threatened to hack BaO or hoppy, as far as I can tell, this is the first time anyone or anything has succeeded.

Soooo, I had to take hoppy out of action again for the second time in just a few days. I tried restoring hoppy for a few days on the server where she had been kept (a company called easyspeedy) but easyspeedy seem to be having some kind of technical or hardware problems of their own as far as I can tell which made restoring there impossible

BaO is currently therefore running on a backup shared server and I've ordered a new "Dedicated managed server" (hoppy IV I think this will be) from a company called Westhost (which is the same place where the backup shared server is running) rather than continue trying with easyspeedy. The fact that the new server will be a "managed" solution should allow me to concentrate less on the background technical thingummy server stuff, and should also be way more stable, secure and hopefully faster to fix if anything goes wrong in the future.

There may be a few glitches that still need to be fixed (due to the move back to the shared dedicated server currently and slightly different configuration settings). If you see anything that appears glitchy, please mention it here and I'll get to fixing it as soon as I can.

The site's restore has been done from the last good backup (before the hack attack) from Early friday morning the June so is free of any hacky stuff. To be extra safe though, it may be worthwhile that members change their passwords, especially Moderators if possible...I think this is probably being over-paraniod, as passwords in the database are encrypted but the hacker could have done anything while he/it was here (it originated from an 18 year old guy from Romania apparently) and although the probability is very tiny indeed, passwords could have been compromised.

Really sorry about BaO having been away for so long....basically it's two very bad but unrelated occurrences...I don't think this has been my lucky week or so.

[Q.Araignee]

I'm sure we're all just glad BaO is back. Let's hope it stays this way, hmmm?

Oh, on the RPG mod's control panel the text is HUGE! There was a little notice at the top too:
[phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /rpg-mod-control-panel.php on line 67: array_merge() [function.array-merge]: Argument #1 is not an array

Thanks Paul!

[DucksRMagical]

Wow! That all sounds very complicated. Thanks for fixing it! I was going through some sirius withdrawal.

I'll get right on changing my password. Just have to hope that I remember it.

[Scellanis]

Well the view new posts search is not working for me today but I haven't noticed anything else yet.

Changing my password gonna be fun, I'm permanently logged in, I have no idea what it is anymore...whoops.

[Paul]

Viewing new posts (and unanswered posts, active topics, and the search function) is working again now. That was a tricky one to track down but had to do with the server load settings...seeing as we're on a shared server for now (until Thursday night) the server load is higher than on old hoppy (as other people's sites are also running and using resources). The search function has a resource limit - if total server resource usage goes above a certain point, the Search function (along with its related friends like the New Posts fuction) stops to ensure the server isn't overloaded. The default limit is 0.9 which seems to be equivalent to a 0.9 "load average" or loadavg, viewable on linux systems by the command:

Code: Select all

cat /proc/loadavg

.
The shared server is running at a high load average so I've set the search to work at anything up to a load average of 5 for now, until we move to the dedicated server (new Hoppy) .

The actual move to New Hoppy will be done by Westhost on Thursday 19th June 2008 between the hours of 10:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. MST. They've advised that there will be around a half an hour downtime whilst things are being moved.

All existing posts including anything up to Thursday 19th will be transferred over...it's probably best not to post anything that you don't want to risk losing on Thursday evening though as there could possibly be a short period during which the site is being copied and then moved where posts made at that time may float into a black hole.

Okies - next, to fix the RPG...or at least have a look at it - may be tomorrow (Wednesday) before I can fix it completely depending on what needs to be done as it's a bit late here right now - oh, that's another thing - is the forum time OK? Aha - it is now.

Great to see people back on the very first day of the forum's reactivation by the way,

[DucksRMagical]

I've been checking multiple times per day ever since it went down!

The chapter of my fan fic that I posted in between the two issues got deleted during the hack, so I had to re-post it. Luckily I write my stuff on my word processor and not directly onto the forum.

[Q.Araignee]

I've just had another look and the control panel looks fine now...I'm a little confused, but oh well. Maybe it was just my laptop's attempt at a rebellion- I have been using it almost constantly for three weeks just for revision and it isn't a happy bunny.

[Q.Araignee]

Sorry for the double post, but I may have spoken too soon. I didn't receive an email saying there was a new pending scenario, and when I tried to look at the current pending scenarios I got the login page with huge text- despite the fact it already says I'm logged in:
[phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /rpg-mod-control-panel-view-scen.php on line 80: array_merge() [function.array-merge]: Argument #1 is not an array

And I can't read the description of a pending character:
[phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /rpg-mod-control-panel-view-char.php on line 71: array_merge() [function.array-merge]: Argument #1 is not an array

[Scellanis]

No, the searches still aren't working for me Paul, sorry.

[Paul]

Don't worry, you weren't cracking up, Q.Araignee. I fixed the "argument is not an array" error on one of the RPG pages last night but had to turn in for a night in dreamworld before being able to repair anything else.

I've been able to do the rest tonight though and all of the RPG pages should be fixed now including being able to view, and set up (and for Moderators to approve or deny) descriptions of characters and scenarios.

I had a look at the shared server load again tonight and it was running at a whopping 6 to 8 (yikes!). I've increased the load limit for searches so that they can be done up to load limit of 10 now. You should be OK with the searches now Scellanis.

Good idea about doing the originals of your fanfic on your PC - if I'd recommend one thing to anyone it would be keep backups of your important stuff - ideally in more than one place to ensure disasters don't wipe you out.