The power of the guilty conscience (or fear of bad PR, hard to say)…the web hosting people have been exceptionally nice these last few days. I wondered why, but now I know… they’re about to throw in the towel and want to us to let them off the hook with a pat on the back and a “there there you poor tired techies you”. According to them the problem seems to be with a hard drive in the shared RAID array. They tried to tell me “and it’s your drive” but I am not buying it. I asked them if they knew what RAID level we were on but it doesn’t matter, this could have been prevented. I am thinking they never set a parity disk so now we are paying for it. They’ve offered to swap us out to another server, but I’m not ready to let this go quite yet…I saw one of my little clean up scripts running in top yesterday, even though that’s a file that wont open. So I have hope that there’s still a light on in there somewhere and I’ll be able to recover something. Heck, it’s better than sudoku in terms of interesting ways to waste your spare time.

Posted by Bryce at 04:00 PM | Permalink

I think we all should give a HUGE round of applause to Bryce for the amount of work he's been doing for us over the past few weeks. Don’t let his effort go to waste!

To kick start the wiki project (really, this is going to be a great project for us this year!), I posted something that I found hiding in the depths of my computer… a draft of the "History of the Sentries." It's a bit out of date because it was written all the way back on October 04 when we were working on the relaunch. I've updated it a bit with a few notes, but could really use your help in expanding it.

I'll be emailing a bunch of you who haven't re-registered yet… the other Sentries could use your help!

Posted by Marie at 06:23 PM | Permalink

Ask and it shall appear. Or something like that. I’ve installed a wiki for our use. There didn’t seem to be too many folks already re-registered so I went ahead and created duplicate accounts for the wiki. Even built a patch so that registering in the future is a two-for-one moment…register for the forum and get a wiki account for free! Marie is leading the “fill the wiki” charge while I track down a few lingering problems. Several of you have pointed out that every so often the server goes dumb. My money is on one or more inaccessible files causing a kernel panic so the server reboots. Sleep is for the weak, but I’m hoping this doesn’t take too many late night hours… but then again, the so called “hot shots” at our hosting company haven’t made much headway. Proving once again that if you want something done you’d better be willing to do it yourself.

Any other requests while I’m slaving away?

Posted by Bryce at 08:59 PM | Permalink

Looking at the empty forums and thinking of all the lost conversations, I remembered that I used to save interesting notes and conversations to text files. That was ages ago – two, three computers ago, maybe more – but I can't be the only one of us that does such things. Wouldn't it be great if we could all do a search for anything we might have saved so that we can rebuild our past?

Here's the exciting part – I've used this idea to convince Bryce to finally set us up with a wiki! It'll be a great way to organize the research and notes that we all used to complain about being scattered through too many threads. We'll easily be able to create hyperlinked relationships, and just imagine the search capabilities! Oh so much easier. And we don't have to use it purely to archive our past. Our present and future are just as important.

Every little bit helps, so please chip in once the wiki is up and working properly – and, if you have any advice on wiki software, please please please send it along to Bryce. He's going on and on about a custom application and security and that's just crazy talk.

Also, if you haven't re-registered (sadly, this is most of us), what are you waiting for?

Posted by Marie at 09:22 PM | Permalink

This is really an exciting time for us Sentries. Sure, we lost all of our old messages, but how many of us really visited the archives? The forums are not who we are, but a record of what we've accomplished. There is so much more left for us to do, to discuss, and to bet on. When I log in to the now empty board, I'm not seeing all that is missing but all that is to come.

This is our year to grow and our opportunity to be… more.

To do that, we need everyone to re-register. So, what are you waiting for – head on over to the forum and check out our new digs! And be sure to stop by the “We're Back” thread and give Bryce the thanks he deserves for getting the forums up as quickly as he did with everything else he has going on.

Posted by Marie at 09:14 PM | Permalink

Fine! How about I hit Clt-Alt-Del, eh? I’m not thrilled with running the second SQL server so much when we don’t know what happened, but I’ve launched the new forums for the Outpost to save myself the headache induced by countless “please oh please” emails from Marie. So talk/debate/laugh/fight but PLEASE let me know if anything starts going sideways or looks a bit wonky. I’ll bet my morning coffee that there are going to be dozens of things that need fixing before this machine is anything close to stable.

Posted by Bryce at 12:56 PM | Permalink

Since Bryce seems to be droning on and on about the various technical issues, let me tell you what's really going on: I've spent the better part of the past few weeks upset that we lost all of our history - our Sentry culture. It's gone. Oh no! The tragedy! Every other email I sent to Bryce was along the lines of "But you've just got to fix it! If it's gone, everyone will leave!" As always, he ignored my pleas and, instead, kept ranting about the corruption. Finally it hit me – we are not just entries in a database and we are so much more than a few words on a message board.

We are the Sentries! We talk, we debate, we laugh, we fight. We are a community! A hive! A family!

My revelation inspired loud guffaws from Bryce, but he did agree to stop trying to figure out the fantastical algorithms behind the corruption long enough to get the forum back up and running. That's right! In a matter of days, the Sentry board will be back!

Obviously, it's not going to be the same. For the time being, at least, everything is gone. So, we'll just have to work together to rebuild all that we've lost and celebrate in all that we have. You will also have to re-register, but that's no big deal. We can do that, right? Right?

Posted by Marie at 11:06 AM | Permalink

Well, it’s back! Sort of. After a few weeks in corrupt data limbo I’ve gotten the Outpost back online. Or at least, the blog.

The folks at the hosting company claim to be on top of this, but…they haven’t solved the problem yet and I don’t know how fast they’re moving. A two week outage is unacceptable but at least I got the ODBC connection to the SQL back to restore the archives. A new board would mean starting from scratch. So, hang in there a while longer. More when there’s more…

Life in a nutshell, sans infinite space: whatever happened did so on the 17th at some ungodly hour of the morning. There was some serious data corruption and by the time I’d had my coffee and logged in Sunday the majority of the files in the account’s root path and db tables were logging errors. It was lookie no touchie at that point. I could see everything, I just couldn’t get a damn thing to open. I tried my best to get to the logs to see if I can make heads or tails out of it. Alas, not much was being piped there so some things were lost.

Of course, when I called the hosting company they “discovered” that there was no backup available to restore our system…the tape for that machine was, as they put it, “accidentally misplaced”. So, thanks to their expert efficiency and stunning (stunned?) customer service, our backup goes south. On the other hand, they’re feeling guilty and I’m using that to get as much attention as I can. Ultimately, if we can get the data recovered from the old boards that’s 90% of the content. But I’m still not thrilled, and I’m not letting them off the hook that fast.

In the meantime, we’ve got a new server document root and SQL installation and I’ve pulled some of Kevin’s templates from my hard drive. So the design should look pretty familiar and the blog is, as I already mentioned, up. I’ll push for full recovery, but the wonderful world of “day job” requires some attention too. More when there’s more.

Posted by Bryce at 04:12 AM | Permalink