|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Spockie-Tech
Site Admin
Joined: 31 May 2004
Posts: 3160
Location: Melbourne, Australia
|
Well, actually I hadnt subscribed to the phpBB mailing list, so I wasnt aware there was a critical vulnerability that had been fixed.. so I have subscribed now. [sigh] another thing to keep on top of..
I did look at updating the version a while back, but didnt go ahead at the time, because there are a few customisations that took a fair bit of work to setup initially, and I wasnt sure on how to proceed with the update without wiping out my customisations..
Thanks to the actions of our friend, I had to figure all that out this morning. The patching proceedure (to preserve those customisations) and correction of the .php files that didnt match the expected code for the patch, then resync'ing and updating the structure of the database all took up about 4 hours of time
Mel's probably growled at you because she thought you were having a dig at me for not keeping the forum up-to-date, and she is one of the people who gets to see how much work does regualrly go into keeping it running normally.
Who remembers how unstable the ABBL forum was ? how many database crashes, hacks and downtime did it suffer ? By comparison, how often has this forum been offline for more than an hour ? and have we ever lost data ?
That kind of reliability takes a good host ($$), regular backups, and constant monitoring.
Thanks to all those who SMS'd me early this morning letting me know it was down.. I was straight out of bed and onto it for 4hrs, even pushing back the work I had scheduled for that day which caused me to be out working until 11pm tonight catching up..
So if you sparked Mel's ire, just remember, she's a firey red-head and often springs to my defense more "enthusastically" than I myself would.. _________________ Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people
|
Thu Aug 04, 2005 11:50 pm |
|
|
|
|
Spockie-Tech
Site Admin
Joined: 31 May 2004
Posts: 3160
Location: Melbourne, Australia
|
The offer to help out with the hosting costs is appreciated, but its not really something I feel comfortable accepting.. honestly.
I wasnt complaining about the cost of hosting it at colin, just pointing out that he complains a lot about people not appreciating his offers of help when what the sport really needs is more builders, event organisers and people who make things happen rather than those who just tell others what they should be doing better.
As someone who has actually gone and built their own arena, you definitaly dont fall into that category, so your offer of financial assistance, while appreciated, isnt necessary.. I would prefer that you put your time/energy/$ into your events and help the sport along in Queensland as you do..
RoboWars is a hobby for me, I expect that my hobbies will cost money, and its not as expensive as some hobbies I've had in the past (Gyrocopters were expensive Cars even more so).
I'm happy seeing the sport move along and people have fun, the cost of operating the website is a drop in the ocean compared to putting on a big event.
If I have to push the hosting up another plan or so because of increased traffic charges, then I might start accepting donations, but thanks to one of my clients having major unused hosting capacity they generously allowed me to use to host the video-clips, I managed to reduce the megabyte-load on the Forum server by moving the video's over there and keep it in the current 6-gigabyte/month plan.
As I've often said before, the best thing you can do to make me feel "appreicated" is build some cool robots, have fun and enjoy the sport.
Knowing that this forum helps facilitate that is reward enough for now.. _________________ Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people
|
Fri Aug 05, 2005 5:07 pm |
|
|
|
|
Spockie-Tech
Site Admin
Joined: 31 May 2004
Posts: 3160
Location: Melbourne, Australia
|
Enough with the plaudits already.. . Thanks guys, but no need to go over the top..
quote:
Originally posted by Nick:
did you have to recover from a backup tape, or just reconfigure and patch?
Fortunately there was no damage done to the SQL databases, so it was just a reconfigure-and-patch job.
The hard part that took the time was meshing the new updated code with the mod'ed code of the present forum (With photo album and a few customisations). Quite a few of the automatic patch hunks failed and had to be manually tweaked into the .php files. All up it took around 4 hours.
HostingShop (the web-host) backs up the entire site every day, every week and every month, so as long as we spot any problems within 1 day, then even if the database got damaged, we would just have to roll back 1 day.
Even If I didnt get the restore-request in within one day, and their daily backup was overwritten with a damaged version, at worst we would have to resort to a week-old backup.
In addition, I usually offsite-backup the database to my machine about once a week through phpBB's backup facility, so I think we are fairly well protected from any permanent catastrophic data loss..
That should help reassure some people that we're not going to disappear just because of some dumb vandal.. _________________ Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people
|
Sat Aug 06, 2005 6:59 pm |
|
|
|
|
|