Quote:Oh, but there are so many good discussions. It is fun once in awhile to go back a few years and eat crow.

Quote:edit: Besides, it's probably not the text that is consuming all the space... *ahem*

Quote:I'm certainly not suggesting deleting old threads. Couldn't the archived threads be put into 'read-only' mode or something?
User-posted images aren't stored on the LL server:P

Quote:Thank You, to both Bolty and Griselda

Quote:So Huzzah, we're back up, and as far as I know we're okay. That said, if you see anything out of the ordinary (like Doc being a nice guy to people or MongoJerry claiming that "Alliance rulz Horde suxx"), let me know as soon as possible. :)

Quote:Hey all, thanks for sticking around all this time and refreshing the page every 10 seconds for the last few days. Wait, you haven't? Jeez!

Sometime in the morning of September 10th, the posts table of the forum became corrupted. Not corrupted in the sense of all the data turning into mush, but corrupted in the sense of the table indexes getting desynchronized from the data present in the table. When this occurs, the database flags the table as corrupted and denies access. This is a good thing since additional data entry into such a table could wipe/damage data.

Griselda, Noble Forum Administrator Who Doesn't Get Paid Enough, caught the problem first and took the forum offline (thanks Gris), helping to prevent any further problems. I saw it later that day and went to work repairing it.

Unfortunately, this was no easy repair. The posts table is gargantuan. Any attempt to repair it would clog the server down and fill up temporary disk quotas as the server churned through all the data to fix the table. At one point, I had a repair process running for 21 hours before giving up on it - it was so blocked up that the server couldn't even progress.

I knew I was outclassed, so I called in the guys at ServInt, the Lounge's host provider, to help. If you've been with the Lounge for many years, you might be aware that I've had this site hosted at lots of different companies. ServInt is by far the best one I've ever been a client of. Their Support is utterly amazing, garnering responses to tickets within 10 minutes and solving problems when everything seems lost. I can't praise these guys enough; for what I'm paying, I don't deserve the level of support they give, but they give it anyway.

Three different reps got in on the action and managed to save the database over the course of a day through modification of system configuration files, memory and disk space management, and numerous repair attempts, along with a rather nicely-sized email chain back and forth from me to them.

So Huzzah, we're back up, and as far as I know we're okay. That said, if you see anything out of the ordinary (like Doc being a nice guy to people or MongoJerry claiming that "Alliance rulz Horde suxx"), let me know as soon as possible. :)

Putting the board back online...*crosses fingers*

-Bolty

Quote:Testing post replyability. Passed!

Testing post editability. Passed!

Quote:Testing post replyability. Passed!

Testing post editability. Passed!

Quote:So Huzzah, we're back up, and as far as I know we're okay. That said, if you see anything out of the ordinary (like Doc being a nice guy to people...), let me know as soon as possible. :)

Quote:Hey all, thanks for sticking around all this time and refreshing the page every 10 seconds for the last few days. Wait, you haven't? Jeez!

Bolty

Quote:So Huzzah, we're back up, and as far as I know we're okay. That said, if you see anything out of the ordinary (like Doc being a nice guy to people or MongoJerry claiming that "Alliance rulz Horde suxx"), let me know as soon as possible. :)

-Bolty