June 6th 2014 Outage

[VirusZero]

So you may have noticed that the forum was down pretty much all yesterday... (June 6th.)

The reason for that is a series of issues adding up.

The primary reason is that our host transferred us to a newer server. Unfortunately I did not get the email in time to warn everyone this was coming. (They sent the email on June 2nd... The server move began on June 3rd and completed on the 6th. I didn't actually get the email until the move was complete and things were going wrong.)

During the 3rd and 6th we were still operating on our old server. So everything was still accessible and working. However on the 6th, they disconnected the old server to push everyone over to the new server.
When switching to a new server this means updating the IP addresses... Which is something I have to do manually. Ordinarily that's not too big of a problem if I'm aware it's coming and can be waiting to switch everything.
Unfortunately this caught me by surprise and, to compound matters, I was at work all yesterday without any real access to a computer so I couldn't login to start to get this fixed until later last night (almost 10PM GMT -5:00 / Eastern Time). And this time to get things fixed I needed the hosts help. But they didn't respond until today (likely because they were swamped in support tickets and they have to sleep at some point too).

Though it has been fixed/resolved now though. Hopefully we won't have to go through another server transfer for a while.

As a heads up though... this transfer has come at a bit of a cost. Anything that was posted or sent from June 3rd to the 6th is gone. That data did not get saved and transferred to the new server. And I do not have a back up copy from this time to restore either. (If I had known a server transfer were inbound then I'd have grabbed a copy of the database on the 5th to at least minimize the data loss some.)