Author Topic: GBO Contingency plans (Read 762 times)

Double D · « **on:** February 28, 2006, 05:08:23 PM »

Fellow Cannoneers.

This day an age circumstances demand that advanced planning be made for disasters. Disaster for us would be the loss of Graybeard's . As you may be aware hackers have attacked GBO several times. The recent attack damaged the software that allows GBO to function and is still being repaired.

Good disaster planning establishes contingency plans and we are doing that. We are going to establish a rally point. What we would like to do is collect your email addreses so we contact you and let you know what is going on and let you know when things will be back up and running should Graybeards get hacked again. You won't have to keep checking back and checking back. We will just let you know when things are back to normal.

If you wish to be part of the rally point send me an email at ddgofer@hotmail.com. Title the email Cannon board. I will put it aside for use in a contingency. Include your User name in the email.

DD and Cat Whisperer
CoModeraters, GBO Blackpowder Mortar and Cannon

Graybeard · « **Reply #1 on:** February 28, 2006, 05:14:50 PM »

Matt seems to think he's found the major culprit in the recent slow down and problems of the site. If he's right it wasn't hacker related at all. He has made a correction he hopes will take care of the matter. I guess in the coming days we'll see.

In the past when hit by hackers we've never taken more than 36 hours to be back up and running and most times it's far less. But one never knows.

Cat Whisperer · « **Reply #2 on:** February 28, 2006, 05:16:56 PM »

Make no mistake about this.

We value highly what we (y'all and DD & I with the support of Graybeard and our sponsors) have here.

This provides a place for us to publish information in case of a catestrophic event like server crashing or hacking.

This place may not be strictly UNIQUE, but it certainly is different. Our deep thanks goes to to all concerned.

Double D · « **Reply #3 on:** February 28, 2006, 05:22:09 PM »

Hurry, give Matt a double shot...of milk!!! As you can see we get real nervous if we don't get our daily dose of GBO!!!

Double D · « **Reply #4 on:** March 01, 2006, 02:31:24 AM »

George, I know you have an interest in this and you may even understand it. Othere here may also may be interesed. Here is the explanation given by Matt on the moerator forum as to what the probelms have been here on GBO

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Noting time of errors is not really a help but the Debug info is a big help.... I have the system in debug mode so that all errors should produce an error message like the one 379 Peterbilt posted. This lets me know where to look, though that error was generated becuse I placed a . instead of a , in a line of code I was editing and should now be fixed.

Please note that the PHP Critical errors are server side errors and I have no way to trace them except when they happen to me. I am working on this and have many others even smarter than me looking into the issue and hope to find the problem soon...... Worst case we would have to wipe the server and start all over from 0, this is NOT what I or GB want to do as we would loose 8 years of data and I am just really not open to this idea at this time.....

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OK, I think I may have fixed a major part of the problems....

As I suspect the major issue is in the database, we average about 200+k of overhead building up per day.... and it does not take long for that to hit a few megs of overhead (data that is there but has no real table or field to associate with and loads every time the database is changed in any way).

Well after installing a neat little tool that lets me re-sync forums and users I found over 10mb of overhead that my normal scans did not find... most users with over 20 posts had overhead linked to the account in the way of improper post counts.... this has been fixed for all GBO members now and should in theory cut the wait time in half if not more for adding, editing and deleting.... these are the things we seem to have problems with.... so did it fix anything? or help at all? beats me.... LET ME KNOW....

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Found another source of some of our problems....

Memebers with images in the sig line that are located on a server other than GBO will slow things down... I am working on a fix for this but if you find a post that takes forever to load look and see if anyone has an image in the sig line or as an avatar that is not on GBO, if you find this please let me know and I can copy the file to our server and re-link the image in the sig line or avatar..... This will speed thing up by at least 60% if not more....

Double D · « **Reply #5 on:** March 01, 2006, 02:54:25 AM »

Please include your user name when you send your email

GGaskill · « **Reply #6 on:** March 01, 2006, 08:20:20 AM »

Posting appears to be much faster.

GGaskill · « **Reply #7 on:** March 01, 2006, 10:08:21 PM »

The board response is still erratic, sometimes really quick, sometimes timing out.

GGaskill · « **Reply #8 on:** March 10, 2006, 05:12:11 PM »

Forum response seems very good now.

Graybeard · « **Reply #9 on:** March 10, 2006, 06:15:09 PM »

It took awhile but Matt finally traced down the source of the problem and fixed it. Unless and until next time we're back to normal again.