It's alive......IT'S ALIVE!!!
Posted: Sat Oct 10, 2015 5:34 pm
Hi guys,
The forum is back online after 6 days downtime.
Sorry for the extended outage, unfortunately what started out as a simple issue grew into a series of problems.
The original database server died last Monday morning. I was expecting this, and had a new server built, ready to replace it.
Unfortunately, when I went to restore the backed up database to the new server, I discovered that there was some internal corruption within many of the data tables, this prevented the database from mounting on the new SQL server.
This corruption has gone back for some time it appears, and as a result all the recent backups had it.
Because of this, there was no option but to manually create new versions of the corrupt tables from scratch and then import the data from the corrupted tables to them. There are well over 100 tables in the database and many of them contain upwards of 100 columns each, so manually mapping and checking the datatypes etc took literally days. This is the reason for the site being down so long.
The upside of this, in a lessons learned kind of way, I've altered the backup scripts to include database consistency checks, so it will check the integrity of the data in the tables rather than blindly backing it up and assuming all is well. You know what they say about 'assume', it makes an ass out of u and me
.
So after all that, the database finally coughed and spluttered into life like a 2.1 on a sub-zero morning, that sound we all know and love
We're back up and running, sorry it took quite so long!
Ciarán
The forum is back online after 6 days downtime.
Sorry for the extended outage, unfortunately what started out as a simple issue grew into a series of problems.
The original database server died last Monday morning. I was expecting this, and had a new server built, ready to replace it.
Unfortunately, when I went to restore the backed up database to the new server, I discovered that there was some internal corruption within many of the data tables, this prevented the database from mounting on the new SQL server.
This corruption has gone back for some time it appears, and as a result all the recent backups had it.
Because of this, there was no option but to manually create new versions of the corrupt tables from scratch and then import the data from the corrupted tables to them. There are well over 100 tables in the database and many of them contain upwards of 100 columns each, so manually mapping and checking the datatypes etc took literally days. This is the reason for the site being down so long.
The upside of this, in a lessons learned kind of way, I've altered the backup scripts to include database consistency checks, so it will check the integrity of the data in the tables rather than blindly backing it up and assuming all is well. You know what they say about 'assume', it makes an ass out of u and me
.So after all that, the database finally coughed and spluttered into life like a 2.1 on a sub-zero morning, that sound we all know and love
We're back up and running, sorry it took quite so long!
Ciarán
