As you can see, the CHGPA forums are back up.
The good news: They're up.
The bad news: All forum content since Feb 20 2006
was lost during the crash at our old web provider.
Big sigh.
In addition: The Mail-2-Forum add-on, which
allows both email and web-based forum use,
is not yet installed or config'd. That in itself
is a big chore and will have to wait a while. So
for the moment, our forums are web-only .
What's happened since July 27th, or whenever
the damn crash happened? Well:
- We've moved to a new web hosting provider.
- Most of the website files have been uploaded.
There are still a few holes.
- The phpBB forum software (latest version)
was installed, and empty forum databases
created.
- The Feb 20th database backup containing
the forum content at our old provider was
loaded.
- Bad data was found in the dumps: extended-ASCII
characters, which wouldn't INSERT correctly.
- So had to isolate the data for the affected table,
and then remove the problem data. No biggie, it
only affects search functionality for a couple
thousand words.
- Another table dump referred to the removed words,
via a word_id . So, more software to identify and
remove those rows.
- Finally, all data uploaded without failures.
- But remember, the backups were from the forums
at the old provider. The latest phpBB has some
changes to the database schema.
- So, installed another empty forum, and compared
table definitions. Identified the differences,
and altered the forum databases which had been
loaded from backup accordingly.
- Finally, the forums started working.
- Changed the DNS Nameservers at our domain registrar
so that 'chgpa.org' resolves to its new home.
- Then on to the little stuff: email accounts,
forwards, subdomains, yada-yada-yada.
Please give things a whirl, and report any problems
that you find in this Forum-HelpDesk forum, or via
email:
webdev@chgpa.org
I'll be out of town this weekend, but will try to
check in on things while I'm away.
Obviously, we will be changing our web/forum
backup policies, to be less reliant on the web
provider. Painful, but less so than this recovery
nightmare.
Enjoy!
Mark C.
Status of CHGPA website and forums
Moderator: markc