[admin (no pm's please)]

Might seem a bit premature as there is no real slow down in the system as it stands, but we are continuing to grow, and I'd much rather we stayed ahead of the game.
The new server is a lot faster than Trillian which hosts some freeforums and all the fastforums, and probably faster than slarti our current big server
We may use the opportunity to retire Trillian or we may order yet another server to take its place.

[Symon]

Thats great news for us the public but i bet the bank manager has just hit the floor

[admin (no pm's please)]

It's a funny old situation, since the forums are financed by marsjupiter.com we are sort of money in the bank rich enough to make it tempting to get two which would be about $15,000.
But since our efforts are now largely directed to the forums which are not as yet making this sort of money, and hence the marsjupiter cash cow is somewhat on the ropes it is still a scary decision.
Regulars may have noticed me not being around quite as much in the last few weeks, as I have had to redirect some time and effort into trying to make some money for marsjupiter
I'm confident it will all work out in the end.

[Symon]

I just hope and prey you didnt use to work for british rail as im sure they said that

[admin (no pm's please)]

The good thing about spending what is in the bank on the system is that whilst we may end up living on rice the actual system costs are reduced to colocation costs which are ultimately less than renting
The same logic has been applied to the office, whilst still in the grief of sorting it all out, we are now running on all virtually new hardware It all leaves us set for the long term construction of the best free forums system.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Have pretty much decided on buying another server as soon as this next new one is installed. The programme will be:

1. Get the new server running as myfineforum.org with a new phpbb3 preview feature which was promised sometime back, but had on reflection no safe home to go to.

2. The new server will also have the bulk of the myfastforum and all the myfreeforums currently on Trillian transferred to it.

3. We will then get the next new server and migrate myfastforum.org to it.

This will leave us with acres of capacity again Though i'd emphasize that this is a proactive step as we are not short of spare at the moment.

[CodyT07]

[admin (no pm's please)]

We bought a new server in May, a real top of the range beast of a machine that replaced two rented servers.
This established that it would be better to buy, but there was no benefit in spending money to replace the last rented server until we got to the point of being able to foresee a need for more power.

Providing a phpbb3 preview is desirable, but not something that can compromise the main phpbb2 service. So nothing is written in stone on it.

[admin (no pm's please)]

The new server is being delivered tomorrow, in the past with a new server or upgrade I have been able to post something along the lines that you will see noticeably faster forums.
This time round we are so far ahead of the game that all I can say is that you may suffer a few minutes outage if your forum gets moved

[CodyT07]

[admin (no pm's please)]

Well yes of course it is, and it does give us some scope as well to play with server settings to try new ways of getting more out of the servers, but it is still a lot less visible than something we can tell people they will see the benefit.

[admin (no pm's please)]

I'm seeing some evidence of the new server now, may well be able to start getting it up and running tomorrow.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Well it has come live for us rather late in the day But I have been able to start copying stuff to it.

Word of warning here, I have at various times leaked the name the new server will operate under as a forums service. So it may be possible for someone to find it and create a forum before it is officially launched. Please don't! when it's all working it will be announced!

[admin (no pm's please)]

Well I have been able to create a forum on the new server, and transfer a myfreeforum to the new server as well.

Can't say I am a totally happy bunny at this point, as whilst you expect errors when setting up a new server as loads and loads of things need to be configured correctly, I did get one error where the internal password created in one place for a forum did not match the password elsewhere meaning the forum could not access its database. I can't currently rationalize why that occurred, as whilst all the setting were not quite right at that point, it should not in my view have effected the password

As you can imagine a lot more testing will occur before letting things go live, I will be finding a few dead forums and bouncing them round all three servers backwards and forwards.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Always good to see why a problem occurs, one password was effecting the generation of another and when the generated password was in place, regenerating it did not overwrite it, thus leaving a password mismatch.

[Roy]

Man if i was you i would have a constant supply of asprine pills at which point i would be known as a junky.

Hopefully there is'nt many more problems to be found.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Well given we have retired older servers, this is now the 5th server on the system, so whilst the process is complex it is getting close to routine.

The major issues are in the security layers, as we take an approach that is multi-layered, so that if the unthinkable happened and one of our passwords was compromised, then the damage might not be total.

[admin (no pm's please)]

A bump on this as the more observant might have noticed we did not replace Trillian on schedule. In the run up to christmas prudence both on time and money kicked in and we postponed the Trillian replacement.
It will though be ordered this month, and it will be the capping off of investment into myfreeforum hardware that will have averaged about $2,500 a month for the last 10 months

[admin (no pm's please)]

Never had so much grief before in trying to get a relatively simple matter like this sorted
But hopefully we will have on order in the next day or so what will be a very powerful server able to boost the capacity of the gallery as well as ensuring the continued speed and reliability of the forums system.
With each new server comes interesting opportunities to improve some of the basic ways we do things without disrupting live services and I'm looking forward to what we can do this time around

[admin (no pm's please)]

Finally with any luck we are within a few hours of having a new quad core xeon processor system with 8gb of ram and 5 x 15Krpm 146gb drives in a RAID5 array.

This will be replacing Trillian which is currently still serving forums at a blazingly fast rate even at the peak times of day

However Trillian lacks the disk capacity to continue to hold the gallery at the retention levels we'd like to see, and is also leased and hence more expensive over the long term.

Once in place we will have oodles of spare capacity on the system, as well as a lot more redundancy so that in the event of hardware issues, forums could be restored else where.

However as all servers will be very new and all have 4hour Gold standard Dell servicing as well as them being in one of the best colocation data centers in the world, with 24/7 onsite engineering care being taken of them, I'd hope we will continue to give as reliable a service as could be hoped for

[CodyT07]

Lets see if I get the server name right
Traillian, Amipest, and I thought their was a third.
Just courious what will the new server be named?

[admin (no pm's please)]

Currently we have slarti, zaphod and trillian (also known as amipest). The new server will be ford.

Tomorrow a process of offloading forums from Trillian to Zaphod will start, I think Zaphod can take all of what Trillian is running without too much of a sweat.

From our point of view we want to decommission Trillian as quickly as we can, as it will be costing us a lot of dosh to continue leasing when we don't need it. So the process will start before we get the new server.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Finally paid for and on order, transfers off Trillian have started.

[Roy]

Excellent, has my forum been moved over coz if it has then the template i'm using has changed to the old template i used yet in congigeration the template i was using is still set as default, how can i get the template to change back to the one its set at in configeration.

[Nick(NR)]

[Roy]

Yup F5 key right? i done that twice but i will try doing it manually.

[Nick(NR)]

I'm seeing the justfooty template, if it's not the right one, check manual override in your configuration, it could have been switched on to a different template or the one for your profile may have been reset.

[Roy]

Ahh so you see it too, thats the old template i checked the configerations and my profife and its all set to the PHPVBB template which i created, i tryed going into my controle panel and saving it to see if that would restore the data but it did'nt so all i can think is my forums been moved over to the new server and needs admin to restore the data him self, coz it was ok about 20 minutes ago.

[admin (no pm's please)]

I am seeing myfs_footballingforum2 as the template.

[admin (no pm's please)]

It is also worth noting that your forum was indeed moved to the new server, but in November!
The only moves taking place yesterday afternoon and evening were of forums that are viewed as inactive by our system.

[Roy]

Ok i will explain what happened, i did'nt log into the forum i just looked to see if there had been any new posts which there had'nt been so i then decided to search for something through the google bar at the bottom of the forum.

When i click view page 2 of the google search i noticed the potal components had gone and the template had turned to my old template (just Footy) i checked to see what was going on by loging in, i checked the admin configeration and it was still set on the created version of PHPVBB which is the template you see admin.

I can recreate the template, thats not a problem neither is putting all the hacks in but i just can't understand why all of a sudden the template changes to the old skin without changing the default style.

[admin (no pm's please)]

I can't see what could have happened there at all But surely none of it happened with the actual "JustFooty" template or "PHPVBB" as once you have copied a template and are editing it yourself it becomes:

myfs_footballingforum1
myfs_footballingforum2
myfs_footballingforum3
or
myfs_footballingforum4

So whatever went on needs to refer to those names.

myfs_footballingforum1

does seem to have been created between 8pm and 9pm last night.

[admin (no pm's please)]

I think I do see how

[admin (no pm's please)]

Do you want this restored from Saturdays backup? Sorry about this.

[Roy]

Yes please, if you don't mind doing it, that is.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Saturdays backup seems to be the same as what is there, files that were last changed on the evening of 12th August Was the template changed since Saturday?

[Roy]

The last time i changed the template was back when the PHPVBB template was down loaded for us to use.

If it can't be restored i will happily remake the template again thats not a problem, its just wierd how this happened.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Most odd, the incrementals show you change template2 since Saturday and Saturdays backup shows loads of template altered recently. But the "1" template in Saturdays backup is from August.

The "2" template in the backup is dated "Jan 14 23:32 myfs_footballingforum2" which is about the phpvBB2 time, allowing of course for time zones.

[Roy]

Yes this is strange, i think i will change my password to be on the safe side but i cn't see that been the case as i'm sure i would not have access to the forums admin panel had someone been able to crack my password.

After seeing the template had changed i did change to template 1 and then back again to template 2 but that was to see if it changed the template back which it did not, oh yeah i showed my mate the old template as he was after a football theame but thats only twice i changed between the templates and i don't think i ever changed the templates while adding the codes for some of the features i have coz i had tested them out on another forum of mine before hand.

[admin (no pm's please)]

All I can say is that in the backups only template "2" shows recent changes.

[Roy]

Yup i added a full portal view, contact admin, add to favorites, news ticker and online off line status to template 2

I have'nt added anything to template 1 for a very long time and infact i deleted template 1 last night so i only have template 2 and 2 original templates which are PHPVBB template just incase i wanted to make a backup template and the other one is a template i was going to have ontill you downloaded the PHPVBB template for us to use.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Is this the mystery solved? I thought it was "1" you wanted restoring, not "2". I can still restore "2" from Saturday.

[Roy]

Ahh, lets hope so.

If you can restore 2 for me please that would be excellent news, just hope it resets the forum to show the right template.

[admin (no pm's please)]

It won;t reset the template set in the forum, but the template files are back to Saturday, you may need to refresh the cache.

[Roy]

Thank you admin, its now showing the template set in configerations.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Well sorry about the problem, but as least it is a mystery solved, and a test of the backup system is always useful. It is amazing how many times people find their backups are useless when a problem arises.

[Roy]

[admin (no pm's please)]

It's not a mystery now how the overwrite occurred, that was a bug, a bug that had been spotted before and had been unfortunately only half fixed. It does take a freak set of coincidences for the issue to arise, hence it slipping through the net. The bug is now fixed.
But at least we did stick with investigating the issue until the bug was spotted.
The thing with our forums system is that it is from the forums management point of view totally developed by us, which on the one hand means we can swiftly add new features and can be a lot more dynamic in our approach, but on the other hand does mean a slight element of "bleeding edge".
But we do run the backups, and we do try and give the support.

[Roy]

Thanks and of course its good to hear that the bug was fixed or in the words i like nuked.

I will have to have 2 of my forums deleted so i will now send the email with there details and links so they can be deleted.

Only question can i put each forum in the same email or is it best to send each seperately?

[admin (no pm's please)]

The current line on forum deletions is to disabled the forum and let the automatic process take care of deleting in time. Saves work.

[Roy]

Ok boss i will disable the boards.

[Nick(NR)]

Roy's not the only one affected by this http://asraifans.myfastforum.org has gone back to subsilver, despite it saying it's set to myfs_asraifans_1 template which I used blackyellow template as a base to build on.

The Error when picking a backup template is as follows:

phpBB : Critical Error

Could not open templates/ / myfs_asraifans2 template config file. The system should now have auto recovered from this error. Please refresh.

DEBUG MODE

Line : 460
File : functions.php

Also when I goto Choose Template to Edit and click the drop down box there isn't a single option, whereas before I had all four in play.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Ok, working on it.

[Roy]

Now my forum isn't loading, HERE is all i get when trying to get to my forum. I've cleared my cache files so i'm just guessing there is something very wrong with this site to 1st loose the quick reply then the template reverted to the original dispite been set as a VBulliten look alike and now the forum page will not even load up.

Is there any other bugs or something thats slipped through?

[admin (no pm's please)]

I can see your forum alright though there is a warning about some of the multimedia types you have on there.

[Roy]

Thats strange when i click on my link even from here i get the same page which is in the link in my last post.

What multimedia has the warning messages?

[Roy]

I really don't get this, i just clicked on my link and instead of going to links found in the search ingine i got this http://search.bearshare.com/webRe...ngforum.myfastforum.org/index.php

No matter what i do i can't get into my forum the page just keeps going to the above page, i've tryed clearing the cache files with the F5 key and even deleted all the cookies manually.

The other think is i don't have music on the forum there should be no multi media whats so ever i don't let people post links or anything like that.

[CodyT07]

[Roy]

What do you mean my forums been hijacked?

[CodyT07]

[Roy]

LOL, i was ahead of myself and its scary when you think of all the things that are available for free but are they really free with the damage they can course to your software etc.

My partner has used Bareshare in the past but after i saw the viruses i unistalled it and had the PC looked at, since then i have tryed to stay away from anything like that and coz my partner likes music i often find myself checking for any new downl;oads and bareshare etc.

Now for my forum, if everyone but me can see it then how come i can't see it and all i remember is i turned the monitor off and went out to a friends, did'nt log out of my forum no one else is in the house or has a key to the house apart from my partner and i, we came back and i turned the monitor on to see that the forum page had closed upon opening the page from the link on here i got the above search resaults but no forum page even after clicking on one of the links in that search resault.

Really i should still be logged into my forum, could this be the reason why the page will not load, i think i was in the admin panel when i turned the monitor off.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Still loading for me, seems to want the java runtime environment for something!

[Roy]

This is very weird and i don't get it, the last thing i added was in a forum discription which was a clock everything i did was done a few day's ago, so since you done that template backup for me i've only added the clock into the forum discription, i tryed one clock in overhead_view.tpl but i removed that code straight after coz i never liked it.

I logged into the forum control panel aswell and then saved and left to see if that would bring back anything but still i can't get the forum index page to open i just get redirected to the search resaults and if i put index.php on the end of the link it say's there was no match.

If the page is still loading for you does this mean there is some kind of bug, the forum was ok when i was using it even after adding that clock, some where in the space of 5 or 6 hours i have lost the ability to look at the forum, i've tryed different key words to see if its that link but nothing.

[Roy]

The forums back, hopefully it never happens agin.