Thursday, August 11, 2016

The Community Forum is up and running.

Well after much hair pulling and asking a bunch of questions I finally got the Community Forum back up and running. We may have lost a couple days of data. The Backup that I restored was from Saturday so don't be surprised if you don't find your last post.

Thanks to all the readers who sent suggestions. Here is what happened for those who are interested.

I use iPower web hosting and they did their job reasonably quickly. They had a hardware issue on one of their servers. It took over night for them to get it repaired which is okay for the level of service I pay for. After the server was back up both my Pattern Catalog and Community Forum were down. The Pattern Catalog was fairly easy to fix. I restored the database from a backup and reconnected it and it was fine.

The Community Forum would still not work after I did the same restore form it's backup. What I did not realize is that the restore was timing out before it completely finished. The script that does the upload has a timeout interval. If it reaches that time it stops. I missed the message that said it timed out so I thought it was done. What you have to do is keep resubmitting the same file until it completes. It's a strange way for it to work but that's how it works. I had to upload the same backup five times for it to complete. After two days of working on it that's all it took.

It's strange that two completely different databases became corrupted at the same time. All I can think of is that they were both being accessed when the server powered off abruptly. The databases just did not get closed appropriately and they did not like that. It's what is known as not having a graceful shutdown. I used to see it at work from time to time. It's just a crap shoot whether is causes a problem or not.

Sorry about the long boring story but several readers emailed with advise so I just wanted to tell my story of woe.