$#$%^& happens…
Probably more often than we would like it (“like” is not a good word here) to happen.
Update 19 Jul, 2009 @ 19:48
It’s nice to find the site suspended when you’ve just come back from a busy vacation… Instead of taking simple troubleshooting steps, the providers decided (again) to simply suspend the account. Next time I will have to find another provider (again). The reason is: overusing the system resources. The actual reason is unknown. Denial of service? Possibly. Can be easily detected by the provider. They even have a specific paragraph in their services list.
OK, anyway, the site has almost disappeared from Google (again) and lost “reputation points”. I’ve become a “phobia” person. I’m afraid of losing stuff. Losing time, energy, money, information, privacy, health, etc… I make backups at least twice a day, I check processes every 5 minutes. Unfortunately you can’t backup/clone everything. But unfortunately you can backup/clone problems.
Jeez.. I love that… Not …
June 5, 2009 @ 18:06
FTC closed 3FN hosting facility along with thousands normal, legal or so called “white” web-sites. I lost two such projects. Some people hundreds. I was making backups (must confess, not often enough, as you can see), some people were not. Of course, no access to the data, no money back, nothing… 3FN was, actually, a good hoster, however, way too “abuse-ignoring” and, probably, too greedy. On the other hand, the amount of SPAM (mostly generated by 3FN bot/spamnet) decreased (not for long, though).
As a result, I have done what I should have done months ago – migrated to another provider (with unlimited traffic). And thinking about the daily backup policy. Probably mirrored.
OK, this is what’s left to be done:
- recover the forum
tweak the forum’s themeupload the missing pictures to the Blogupload what’s left from the pictures to the Forumcheck all links, bits and pieces again and again
Should you notice anything wrong, please let me know in this thread. Also, if you can, please re-enter your comments/posts and reupload pictures.
And please accept my excuses, apologies and “sorries”. I know it’s utterly frustrating to redo/rewrite/recompose/recreate what you have done and let go. I hope I’ve become smarter and more experienced now.
Related articles (3FN shut down):
– Discussion on Slashdot
– Washington post
– Reuters
– Federal Trade Commission
– The Register
Sorry you had to put up with the hassle. This kind of crap apparently happens all the time in the ISP world. Short of a redundant five 9s hosted service, there’s not much you can do, except back up a lot.
I feel for you Ra!
We’ve all fallen foul of the ISP world pulling the metaphorical plug. What I never understand is how they keep on getting away with it – and some of the biggest are the worst.
Keep up the great work and don’t be too down-hearted!
MJ
“doubleflash ” wrote:
True, what I missed is the uploaded pictures. I still have them locally, but the problem is that all posts since February need to be revisited and all the missing pictured reuploaded. That’s gonna take awhile.
“Madjack ” wrote:
Cheers Madjack!
“Madjack ” wrote:
I’ll try not to disappoint 😉
Just added some articles. Read the comments if you have time.
Yeah, backups, backups …
Офтоп.
Доброго времени суток,Like Ra
На роботе, админ чето подкрутил на серваке (похоже отключил джава скрипт), и я немогу заходить на форум. Вот что я вижу http://i039.radikal.ru/0906/c6/6b06c18bd154.jpg когда открываю форум. Как можно зайти на форум? Или на форуме че нибудь подкрутить :-)сделать html версию. Другой возможности доступа до инета у меня нет.
Ответ можно на указанное мыло.
“porter ” wrote:
Очень похоже на то. Без JS работать не будет.
“doubleflash ” wrote:
Look at that!!! Also painful….
Webhost hack wipes out data for 100,000 sites
backups, backups …
All May pictures have been restored and backed up.
April’s done!
Ha… Probably for a couple of days …
Uploaded pictures for March and February. So all pictures (excluding one I could not find) have been reuploaded!
Just an FYI: the blog contains more than 2000 pictures!
Restored the look of the forum
Hey – almost as good as new!
Ra – we are all very poor at thanking you for your efforts in creating and running this site.
Please allow me to express my own thanks and, I’m sure, the thanks of all the regular visitors and contributors to this site, for all the hard work you put in to bring a little more happinese to all our lives!
Brilliant work – long may it continue!
MJ
Many-many thanks Madjack! I really appreciate that. This is what keeps me from giving up.
Oh-oh!
Forum is down – some message about spaming. Assume must be member who’s been infected with a Trojan or similar that’s now using ID to send out Spam (hope it’s not me – shouldn’t be, I spend enough on firewalls and virus guards!)
MJ
Dunno why but the forum sware decided to block two users: you and another one. I do not know why, can’t find any reasons.So, I just unblocked. Probably need to upgrade mybb again or look for debugging switches.
Ok – thanks for that… another ISP mystery!
And now the good news! Have got a few days all to myself, so should be doing at least 2 ‘proper’ sessions.
Will do my very best to get some shots and post on the forum.
MJ
Good luck! Eagerly waiting for the results/photos!
Tweaked another thing in the forum config. Just scream here if you got blocked.
OK, I think I can “close this call” for some time. With the exception of some pictures, everything has been recovered, upgraded, updated and rechecked.
BTW, the site was blocked again several weeks ago because of high load. The hosting company said that the load (almost?) crashed the server, but the information for 3 days was lost. So I had to recover it again. Fortunately, I had backups this time (but not all of them worked, ha-ha).
Out of these scary experiences I completely redesigned my home server by adding a RAID5 disk array, moving the root file system to RAID1 and creating a backup of everything again.
So, was quite busy, hence practically no updates and low “visible activity”.