As you might of noticed at approx 15:00 on 13/09/08 the KOD forum went offline. This was caused by a corrupt partition on the HyperVisor server which had a detrimental effect on the virtual servers hosted on it. At approx 8:00pm I started the 1 hour and 20 minute drive down to the data center to try and boot the server and recover the damaged partition. After arriving at the data center and getting the server booted and online I then made the 1 hour and 20 minute drive home and finally got in at about 11:00pm at which time I ate my roast dinner which was now cold and tried to recover what I could from the server. Things were not looking good at all and at 3:00am on 14/09/09 I admitted defeat as there was no way this damaged partition was being recovered so I started the reinstall process on the server. At about 3:30am the HyperVisor was reinstall and I started the creation of the virtual server that KOD is hosted on. At this point I went to sleep to let the server build finish overnight. At about 9:00am on 14/09/09 I recreated the hosting account for KOD and then awaiting for Dean to send me over the database backup which he had downloaded a few days prior to the failure. The database was received and in that knowledge I went to back to sleep untill 11:00 and then got ready for work. Finally at approx 18:00 I reinstalled the phpbb files and then injected the database backup into the MySQL server with my fingers crossed, 2 minutes later I checked the forum and everything seemed to be back how it was except for 4 members (sorry guys you will need to register again)
The new virtual server has been built with a faster filesystem which allows data recovery with ease and also the ability to make incremental snapshots. From this point forward I shall setup an automatic task to backup the site weekly (most likely on a Sunday evening) and this backup will then be stored on a remote server accross the pond in America.
Sorry for the downtime folks, you should now see a speed improvement on the site due to the way the server has been installed and partitioned.
Kind Regards Greg Langford
