Drunkard's Walk Forums

Well.  That was fun.

NetCarrier, the service provider which hosts this site, was smacked in the face with a massive power surge late yesterday morning, so big it apparently blew out all their protective equipment and their power backups, right down, it seems, to the batteries in the support techs' flashlights.  Yes, I know that sounds unlikely, but that's what NetCarrier was reporting in its Twitter feed yesterday:

It knocked out everything that NetCarrier provides, including phone service and email. Even their own customer contact phone number was screwed over.

Anyway, it took them three or four hours to get it all back up and running from an alternate location, and the power company is apparently trying to figure out what the hell happened. By that time, though, Peg and I were in the middle of hosting a birthday party, and I didn't get back to see what was up until very late last night. Upon which I discovered that while my email and site were back, something about the boards was borked.

I initially asked for help over at the MyBB boards, but I've posted like one thread there in two years and my cry for help still hasn't been approved for public consumption the last I looked. Fortunately, the emails that got sent to me by the board when it crashed were enough for awake and aware me today to do some research and figure out how to fix things from my SQL control panel. I just figured out how to do that about 20 minutes ago, and voila! We are back.

In the words of the Almighty, we apologize for the inconvenience.

(10-25-2020, 01:16 PM)Bob Schroeck Wrote: [ -> ]I initially asked for help over at the MyBB boards, but I've posted like one thread there in two years and my cry for help still hasn't been approved for public consumption the last I looked.

Yeesh.  I think that alone warrants looking into other board software, Bob.

You want I should take another month to move all the board contents? <grin> (Actually, I suspect that most of the major boards can harvest/convert each other's DBs...)

EDIT: I should add that at the time I wrote that I could at least see the thread on my user page. When I went back to let them know the help wasn't needed, the entire thread seemed to have vanished completely. I am going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume someone went to check in on the problem -- the post did have the board's URL in it -- before approving the thread, found it fixed, and basically said to themselves, "welp, no need for this now".

(10-25-2020, 01:16 PM)Bob Schroeck Wrote: [ -> ]Well.  That was fun.

NetCarrier, the service provider which hosts this site, was smacked in the face with a massive power surge late yesterday morning, so big it apparently blew out all their protective equipment and their power backups, right down, it seems, to the batteries in the support techs' flashlights.

Irritating, Yes, but I'd kind of call the actual EVENT an act of god.

The fact that it scrambled the bbs data, on the other hand...  Is an act of man.  To wit, that the folks who wrote mybbs never considered the possiblity that something might happen to the server farm in mid write.

Though, in their defense, it would never have occured to me EITHER.

Actually, it wasn't a MyBB problem, in the end, strictly speaking. I had to use a MySQL command to clear a wedged temp table, IIRC, after which the board could operate properly.