As promised, an explanation of this mornings fun and games.
Firstly, a bit of history...
When this site was created (reasons for which are another story), and hosting company called Hosting Unlimited were chosen as our hosting company and domain registrar.
The site launched on 11th July 2006. However, from the outset, it became apparent that the servers we were hosted on had performance issues, and we had frequent outages and massive slowdowns. Hosting Unlimited seemed unable to fix the issues, and unwilling to even acknowledge them. When presented with indisputable evidence, they pulled the plug on us, without any warning, on 10am 24th July 2006. Tossers.
To get the site up and running as quickly as possible, with LB66's help, I made the Authorititive DNS nameservers for omegaowners.com ones that I have full control over (by making changes via the domain registrar - Hosting Unlimited - pointing back to my DNS servers). I quickly copied the old forum backup to my test platform (a Redhat Linux running under a VM on a W2k3 server at my place).
Other problems aside, that is how it had been running since - other glitches have been unrelated.
Roll on this morning...
Having some real work to do this morning, I was unaware of any problems with the forum until Taxi Driver sent me a text (thanks for the heads up mate
).
Upon logging on, I was presented with the forum as it was on 24th July 2006 - the day hosting unlimited pulled the plug. Now seeing as that date is forever in my memories, I knew exactly what had happened:
The incompetent tossers at Hosting Unlimited had changed the authorititive nameservers (DNS) away from my DNS servers back to their own. Again no warning. This resulted in users being directed back to the remains of our old forum that was hosted with HU up til 24th July 2006.
Again, with LB66's help, I've changed the authoritive DNS back to mine. Unfortunately, due to the way DNS works, this can take up to 72hrs to propogate throughout the net, so many would still be getting old site, some would be getting proper site.
To prevent this, old site now in 'Maintenence Mode' which should prevent any posts. And the proper site is currently being referenced by its IP address rather than omegaowners.com - thats why you all had to log in again, as the cookie was no longer valid.
I tried to put redirects on the old HU site, but the scumbags had also screwed up our logins to be able to upload new files (not quite true - our ftp logons were pointing to wrong webspace!). With a lot of assistance from the guys at work, we managed to upload some redirects, and write some scripts that redirect the majority of pages back to the homepage here. Job down.
It has been a busy, at times, stressful day, but we got there.
Big thanks to LB66 for digging out some essential info.
Although they probably won't read this, I would like to publically say a huge, huge thanks to my work colleagues and team leader, esp DCW and RPP for the assistance they gave rewriting scripts in such short time. First round on me next Wed [smiley=beer.gif]
On behalf of the Admin Team, I would like to humbly apologise for the outage, esp as it came on the top of one on Sunday (more of which another time).
