Sorry for the downtime

[Paul]

No, as much as Windows is great for home PCs, I've never tried a Windows server as I'd heard similar things about reliability. Hoppy runs gentoo linux (which is also nice for home PCs - I sometimes use it at home on mine...got a mad quadruple-boot system set up here on my PC at home). Gentoo is quite nifty as it configures and compiles its software to your hardware to get the best performance it can for your particular processor and system.

Thanks for the positive thoughts everyone. That sounds like a horrendous experience at that other site, Augusta .

[FawkesthePhoenix]

we have linux, it rocks!

[Paul]

Yay, another Linux user! Do you have it on your home PC? I'd prefer to use it all the time rather than Windows if I could but I've got some programs that there are no Linux versions of that I can't live without...if only software companies would make versions for Linux available. I've tried running QEMU (which allows you to install a virtual windows environment within linux) but it's so slow on my PC it just doesn't work at all.

[FawkesthePhoenix]

we have it on our PC, but we also have windows.... i'm not that much of a computer person, so if you want all the info about our linux you might have more luck talking to youknowwho.

[Paul]

I'd be interested to know what version (or distribution) you're using youknowwho. I've hear Ubuntu seems to be getting popular but I've never looked into that one.

I'm doing some updating to hoppy at the moment which will mean that the forum will be inaccessible for a short while on Sunday around UK lunchtime. It will probably only be about an hour or 2 or downtime...possibly even less than an hour if things go quickly and smoothly.

[Paul]

Okies, the forum downtime is over with no problems occurring in the upgrade - yay! There shouldn't be any differences to the forum currently (that's to come soon) but if you do see anything different happening or glitches, please do mention them here.

[Paul]

Weheee - hoppy is back on her feet again after her short illness which started on Tuesday. The forum should be in exactly the same state as before she become unwell - there shouldn't be a single second's data loss, as in the end she was brought back to health with a few magical incantations, mainly e2fsck -y and e2fsck -cc...the backups from a few hours before her collapse weren't eventually needed. Sincere apologies for the time the forum wasn't available. Most of the downtime was to ensure that the backups were full and safe, just in case the incantations didn't work.

I'm not absolutely certain how she became unwell, but I'm pretty sure it's nothing anyone did on the forum or any hacking attempts. At one point things looked like it was a very bad hard drive problem - there were certainly thousands of "bad blocks" being reported and I'm still unsure whether this is a sign of a possible failing of hoppy's hard drive.

The results of the final fixing incantation e2fsck -cc seemed to indicate possibly not such a bad problem though, and it may just be that at one point a file was deleted (just in the normal course if things), but the inode (which is a number on the disk which points to the file, something like an index number) wasn't deleted (maybe due to something stopping operations). From what I understand, something like a power outage may be the type of thing that could cause this. Interestingly the day after hoppy became ill, I couldn't connect at all to the server company where hoppy is based in Denmark....I'm wondering if they had any power problems therefore, and whether that may have possibly caused this to happen.

Hopefully this is just an odd random happenining which shouldn't reoccur, and not the sign of a failing hard drive which I'd originally feared. I'll keep a even-more-careful-than-usual watch on hoppy over the next few days and weeks though to ensure she stays happy and healthy.

[DucksRMagical]

I'm glad you were able to fix it! We were all joking that my fan fic broke the server. When it first broke, I got a debug error message when I tried to access the board. Which is what I got when I first tried posting my fan fic.

I'm glad it wasn't hacked. One of the pet message boards I'm on gets hacked every once and a while. It's very weird.

[Scarlet Lioness]

Yay! Good for Hoppy!

To be honest, I didn't even notice the server was down.

[Paul]

Hee hee - I'd thought to myself that you may have wondered whether it was your fanfic, Duckie, but don't worry, I'm pretty sure it wasn't that.

I just had a quick look to see if there were and really strong patterns of visits for weekdays compared to weekends to see whether there were likely to be a lot of people like yourself Scarlet who may have not noticed much seeing as things happened during the middle of the week rather than a weekend. There doesn't seem to be much of a difference though, but there's definitely a pattern in the time of day - Around 8AM UK time is the quietest, with activity peaking at 10PM with over double the average visits compared to 8AM.

[Simatra]

YEA! I tried getting on yesterday and it didn't work...

[Paul]

Ooooh, I've just noticed the strange characters in the title of the Obliviate vs Deneuralizer what if…? thread. Does anyone remember whether they were there before?

[Scellanis]

Lol, I saw that thread and was wondering that.

Glad it is back...

[GodrictheGriffon]

Actually I've noticed that a lot are like that. Even some have Japanese.

[Paul]

Japanese...eek, hey well I guess that's good, the forum has gone truly international now!

The main problem I've seen seems to be either where single or double quotes ( ' or " characters ) have been used in some old posts (I think). It may be a good idea if maybe we could post links here to the different types of odd character combinations - if I can then get a summary together of all the odd combinations and what the real character should be, I should be able to get the database to replace the oddities with the correct characters somehow.