Network Outage

[admin]

This is for the benefit of all members of the HWI forum who chance to see this post.

Yesterday (Saturday) shortly before midnight BST, a transformer belonging to Proboards' host, The Planet, in Houston caught fire. We are assured that no servers in the data centre have been damaged but power has been shut down in accordance with instructions from the fire department. This has affected several servers including #20 which HWI uses.

There is currently no indication as to how long it might be until power is restored. Meanwhile, if there are any significant developments, I will post them here.

Roger

[richnorri]

Thanks for the information, Roger!

The HWI Forum is still down at the moment, so I'm off for breakfast. I'll look again this afternoon.

Richard

[admin]

Hi Richard,

If I were you, I would take breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper. This could take a while.

Apparently, there was an explosion which took out a wall of the Data Centre in Houston. ProBoards have now acquired 24 new servers and are in the process of installing them. They will then transfer everything from their back-up to the new servers which will put us back online. However, the back-up only includes data up to the end of April. Every post, every new registration and any other changes made throughout May will be temporarily lost. In due course, data will be transfered from the old servers to the new ones. At that point, everything should be fully restored. That could take two or three days.

In view of ProBoards' plan of action, I have asked the following question:

Assuming I do not put my forum into Maintenance Mode [which many Forum Admins are proposing] when it comes back online, in what order will posts appear in any given thread once all data is transferred from the old server to the new one? Will it be:

a) All posts up to end April, followed by the first few days in June, followed (eventually) by everything posted in May?

OR

b) All posts made during May inserted in the correct chronological order?

I am awaiting an answer!

Roger

[admin]

Here is the reply:

We plan to do our best to make sure everything shows up in the correct order. The only overlap issues we anticipate is from old threads that may get replied to, in which case we may have to give one thread's precedence over another's.

The first sentense is reassuring but I'm not sure I understand the rest of it. It is the old (that is, existing) threads that I was worried about. Somehow, I think we may have to wait and see but, if posts appear out of sequence, there will be nothing we can do to rectify it.

Roger

[dazza]

Hi Roger,

Thanks for the information, this also explains why a Stoke City forum I use, which is also proboards is down at the moment.

Hopefully things will be up and running at HWI again soon.

Dazza

[martin]

Thanks for the update Roger. I had guessed there was something serious going on in fact I have had to wash the car this morning as I was at a loss what to do without HWI!

Martin

[admin]

In case anyone else is unable to access ProBoards forums, the servers affected at the moment are Nos 1-7, 9-24, 26-29, 33 and 45-48.

AAI is okay, we're on No 66!

Roger

[stephany]

Hello Roger,

Thank you for the information! Hopefully it will be back to normal very soon.

Love,
Stephany

[admin]

Apparently StatsCounter.com uses the same host. Consequently, the stats on the main sites at HWI and AAI are currently unavailable.

Dear Members,

Due to an outage at The Planet (data center) several of our servers are down and service is limited. We sincerely apologise for this interruption in service. Unfortunately, some stats will be lost during this outage. We continue to work to restore full service and thank you for your patience.

The StatCounter Team

I think I'll go and cut the grass before my lawn mower goes down! On second thoughts, perhaps I'll wait until it does!

Roger

[Dave]

Hi Roger and everyone,

As this is dragging on for so long, I've posted the headline details on the front page of the HWI website, together with a link to this thread at AAI.

Let's hope the Proboards and Server Hosts techies can fix it sometime today!

Dave

[grant]

Hello Everyone - Roger and Dave in particular

I echo Martins sentiments about the forum, there is a definite feeling of loss when it is not around, but it is far worse when the loss is unexplained so thanks guys for keeping us informed! :applaud:

It certainly sounds like a major incident so I guess we have to be thankful that we will, in fact, get most, if not all of it back eventually. Unfortunately I am not able to either wash my car or mow the lawns as it is currently raining heavily here!

For Dave's benefit, If I detect a problem with the forum I always look at the main site to see if the reason for it is given. So thanks for putting it on the main site which is where I found out to come over here before going into temporary meltdown!

Best wishes
Grant

[richnorri]

Hello everybody!

I'm not trying to create extra work, but if anybody finds some important news about Hayley while the HWI Forum is down, there is a thread on this forum HERE. You could post there and copy it across to HWI later.

Richard

[Northern_Lights]

HWI is still down. And it happened on a Saturday!!! I KNEW Saturday is cursed!

[Joe]

Thanks Roger and Dave for keeping us up-to-date on the outage.

I also posted a message on my Cottars forum explaining the situation.

Crews in Houston, Texas, are working round the clock to implement new backup servers. I hope the loss of data will be minimal.

To check the status of HWI forum's server 20, click below.
www.proboards.com/server_status.html

Best regards,
Joe

[Northern_Lights]

Some servers have been put back up. If they go in order, 20 will be the 6th server up again.

I will post a quick message about this on the Lynn Hilary forum