Recent Downtime

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Technical Administrator
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Recent Downtime

Post by Technical Administrator »

Many of our regular members and perhaps some new members may have noticed that the board was offline from 23 December, 23:13 GMT to 24 December, 11:12 GMT.

This downtime was a preventative measure put in place while our host was having problems. Nightscrawlers administrators were notified on 23 December that some users were having problems accessing the main page; we were able to trace this error to a lack of disk space on one of our host's partitions which is used for storing some of our database's information while it's online.

Whenever this kind of error occurs, there is the very real chance that data could be lost. Some of our more astute members had noticed that other forum pages could be accessed besides the main page. These forum pages had the capability of executing queries that could only aggravate the problem and lead to corruption or loss of data.

Indeed, there is a precedent for this. I am informed by Saint Kurt that our board crashed last July because MySQL's user table was overwritten when the disk ran out of space, leading to a crash and loss of data. Therefore, the board was turned off so that the damage caused by this error could be minimised.

Now that the error has been fixed, we have been informed by our host that this error was caused when another customer executed a script that looped and filled up the partition with temporary files. It may also have been aggravated by the server's hard drive failure and replacement; we're not sure if they're related, though we have considered it and are awaiting word from our host.

This has since been fixed and our host is putting monitors in place to make sure that this problem does not happen again. They apologise, as do we, for the temporary inconvenience.

Thank you,

-Northstar
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StarChild
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Recent Downtime

Post by StarChild »

Thanks to you, Northstar, and Nightscrawlers staff for keeping us up and running! Your work is appreciated! :beer
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Ah, yes...lover at heart and along comes the ultimate romantic! Fox hunt ala Nightcrawler
john117
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Recent Downtime

Post by john117 »

thanks hood man :)
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