Omega Owners Forum
Chat Area => General Discussion Area => Topic started by: TheBoy on 28 November 2006, 20:04:39
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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 :y).
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referenced by its IP address rather than omegaowners.com - thats why you all had to log in again, as the cookie was no longer valid.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).
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As far as I can see Jaime, it was not any of you that was at fault, so please do not apologise. Thank you for working so hard to put things right :y
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I for one think that we get great service from the admins, especially considering that it's free! Good job w/ da recovery TB! :y
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Hear hear & a big thanks to all involved :y
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Yeah. No need to apologise at all
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Have to say TOP JOB to all those involved in restoring the site/forums back to full working order....give yourselves a pat on the back ;)
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Have to say TOP JOB to all those involved in restoring the site/forums back to full working order....give yourselves a pat on the back ;)
I've had a few beers, does that count? ;D
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My heart goes out to you today TB - ive had a bad day God knows what yours has been like specially when this is unpaid work :y
have another beer :y but dont blame me for your hangover ;)
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Bloody hell you guys work hard to keep this place going :y
Lot's of respect to you!
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And i thought i was having a bad time cos i had to reboot my pc to get it to log onto t'internet this evening ::)
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Well done guys and all your back up. :y
That explanation has blown my brain and I thought fixing boilers was tough ;D
What a Great skill you guys have :y
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Well done TB, and thank you and the rest of the admins for this site!
Do you want to move the domain name away from HU...? As you are now hosting the site yourself, you don't really need them anymore..
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Well done TB on sorting the prob so quickly :y
I found it quite amusing being on the old site to start with.......esp as some people were replying to posts made in July ;D ......no names mentioned......but one should get outa bed earlier :-X ;D
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Well, that narrows it down..............to one ;D
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HU sound like a nasty bunch of Mofo's. We (my gaming community) had a load of issues with our old host. The MD of the company had done a runner with our money and pretty much let his servers and company slip into anarchy, followed by banckrupcy. Fortunately we (I) managed to broker a fantastic deal with new hosts Multiplay UK. As we had our own box, and only pay for the bandwidth, they were happy to give us some leaway in funding the huge bandwidth costs of hosting it.
Cut a long story short, I feel your pain! :-/
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Well done for sorting it - what a nightmare!
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Well done TB, and thank you and the rest of the admins for this site!
Do you want to move the domain name away from HU...? As you are now hosting the site yourself, you don't really need them anymore..
Since 24th July, HU have purely been the domain registrar. I felt uncomfortable with them remaining as the registrar as I lost all confidence in them several months ago. We did not move registrars in July when we moved the site due to a 60 day rule on transferring .com addresses. Laidback and I were only discussing moving registrars last week. I am keen to keep the registrars and hosting as 2 seperate entities, rather than a bundled package to prevent situations like this happenning in the future...
Hosting wise, if current hosting performance is OK, it can stay where it is for now. I'm relying on you guys to let me know of performance issues, as I have a nice gigabit connection to it most of the time....