# So... Is Enworld doing okay?



## Storyteller01 (May 10, 2006)

Just managed to get back into the site. Had to spend time on the WotC website (I now understand the complaints...). Everything okay out there?


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## Crothian (May 10, 2006)

It is a little slow, review site is down, and we are misisng 5 months of everything....other then that, we'll see.


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## Nifft (May 10, 2006)

Every now and again, dark tentacled things from beyond reach through the Aether and bring down this site. Occasionally they eat posters, too. The important thing is to avoid menti$*(&@FP $OUI . . . NO CARRIER


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## Nyaricus (May 10, 2006)

yeah, I am missing double my number of current posts - I had alot to sat those last 5 months!

Oh well, this is, after all, the internet. I guess in another year we can all laugh at this :\

Still upset at all the good threads we lost though.


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## Dog Moon (May 10, 2006)

Nyaricus said:
			
		

> yeah, I am missing double my number of current posts - I had alot to sat those last 5 months!
> 
> Oh well, this is, after all, the internet. I guess in another year we can all laugh at this :\
> 
> Still upset at all the good threads we lost though.




Yeah, same here, but I do apparently get the enjoyment of hitting 1000 posts all over again.

I'm glad I had saved a few of the threads I'd found and some I had bookmarked, but I lost a lot of stuff.  Oh well.


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## Steve Jung (May 10, 2006)

Nifft said:
			
		

> Every now and again, dark tentacled things from beyond reach through the Aether and bring down this site. Occasionally they eat posters, too. The important thing is to avoid menti$*(&@FP $OUI . . . NO CARRIER



Dude. Can I have your post count?


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## Jdvn1 (May 10, 2006)

Steve Jung said:
			
		

> Dude. Can I have your post count?



 I'll split it with you.


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## Nyaricus (May 10, 2006)

Jdvn1 said:
			
		

> I'll split it with you.



I'll just take 10% of Crothians 

BTW, I quoted you a bit from that chatline on Monday - funny stuff dude


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## Seravin (May 10, 2006)

Nifft said:
			
		

> Every now and again, dark tentacled things from beyond reach through the Aether and bring down this site. Occasionally they eat posters, too. The important thing is to avoid menti$*(&@FP $OUI . . . NO CARRIER




Piffle (whatever that means).  It's a fine explanation, but the real explanation is that both Sep and PC posted.  The board did exactly what I would have done and shut down.


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## Jdvn1 (May 10, 2006)

Nyaricus said:
			
		

> I'll just take 10% of Crothians
> 
> BTW, I quoted you a bit from that chatline on Monday - funny stuff dude



 I don't think he's selling. 

And I noticed! I think lots of people were being goofy (goofy is cool!)... a log of that could be cool. I tried to log in to there earlier today and couldn't.


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## Whisper72 (May 10, 2006)

I certainly hope everything is OK now. Thanks for all those who worked overtime to get the site back on track...

Oh, and, although I understand it is quite a hassle, maybe backups should be made more frequently???

Anyhoo, good to be back...


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## Jdvn1 (May 10, 2006)

I think they plan to make backups more often now. They mentioned something like that on one of the other threads.

And it's not entirely back on track (reviews are still down, searching is still down, lots of people don't have their CS accounts), but the basic site works and we're all happy with that.


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## Dog Moon (May 10, 2006)

Jdvn1 said:
			
		

> I think they plan to make backups more often now. They mentioned something like that on one of the other threads.




I think hourly would be good.  

But seriously, at least monthly.  Would prefer weekly, but honestly, I have no idea how long or what kind of work it takes to backup everything.  Although considering the size of this site, it can't be TOO easy.


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## Nightfall (May 10, 2006)

It's doing better than I thought after I shot it.


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## Li Shenron (May 10, 2006)

Storyteller01 said:
			
		

> Just managed to get back into the site. Had to spend time on the WotC website (I now understand the complaints...). Everything okay out there?




No. All PbP games lost...


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## Olgar Shiverstone (May 10, 2006)

Nyaricus said:
			
		

> I'll just take 10% of Crothians
> 
> BTW, I quoted you a bit from that chatline on Monday - funny stuff dude




This was all part of my evil plan to bring Crothian's postcount down to merely human levels.

Welcome back, ENWorld!


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## Pseudonym (May 10, 2006)

I only lost about 100 posts, so I guess it means I should be posting more.  I am glad the site is back up again, I was getting twitchy.


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## francisca (May 10, 2006)

You know, you guys really aren't defined by your post count.  Or you shouldn't be, anyway.


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## Xer0 (May 10, 2006)

You know, I hate to ask this, but what's going to happen to those of us who became community supporters between December and now?  I had signed up about two months ago and now I've come back and (understandably) I'm back as a registered user and not as a supporter.


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## Whisper72 (May 10, 2006)

It has already been mentioned by admins that they will manually retrieve who was a supporter and reïnstate the status. They also mentioned that, since it has to be done manually, it will take some time to get everyone up to speed.

Through the payments and the seperate shop-database, they can track who has purchased an account and when...

To relax, they are not forgetting their supporters...


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## Xer0 (May 10, 2006)

That's good to know.  There was only a small amount of doubt in my mind.  I can only imagine the monumental task that lies ahead for the admins.

Patience is the watchword, I believe.


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## Estlor (May 10, 2006)

I just have to re-write a couple of reviews...

Computers + Constant Use = The Occasional Hiccup Along the Way.

Thank goodness the shop was in a different database.  That would have made a real nightmare if that got all boogered up.


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## Nifft (May 10, 2006)

Steve Jung said:
			
		

> Dude. Can I have your post count?




I didn't cut my way out of Ctulhu's gullet (which closed by way of muscular action) just to give up my post count.

In fact, I'll write post a pointless post right now.

 -- N


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## Nifft (May 10, 2006)

PS: For those who have lost significant posts -- *search on Google, click on cached* -- Google stores a lot of stuff for a long time.

 -- N


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## Pseudonym (May 10, 2006)

francisca said:
			
		

> You know, you guys really aren't defined by your post count.  Or you shouldn't be, anyway.




I know.  I was musing that for someone who has been a member (in this incarnation) for four years, I should probably have more to contrubite, post-wise.


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## Estlor (May 10, 2006)

Nifft said:
			
		

> PS: For those who have lost significant posts -- *search on Google, click on cached* -- Google stores a lot of stuff for a long time.
> 
> -- N




Good idea.  *Retrieves his lost reviews*

Well that just saved me a couple hours.


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## GQuail (May 10, 2006)

I only really started posting properly rather than lurking the past few months, so I'm a bit gutted that my minimal contributions to ENWorld have been chewed up.

Of course, this is only an interent site I waste time while I'm at work and steal bits for my D&D game: I do not have 5 months of dead play-by-mail games or fifty-page-threads scattered into Google cache.  So I have no real reason to complain.  :>


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## Nyaricus (May 10, 2006)

Jdvn1 said:
			
		

> I don't think he's selling.
> 
> And I noticed! I think lots of people were being goofy (goofy is cool!)... a log of that could be cool. I tried to log in to there earlier today and couldn't.



Well, I'll ask him myself then! (Crothy, you selling dude?) and yeah, a log would be great, IMO. I guess there aer otehr, more pressing issues ATM however 

I'm sure someone who is helping running google is going to go "WTF?" with all the EN World ______ searches however.

How do you find the most popular searches again? heh heh


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## Storyteller01 (May 10, 2006)

Good to hear that everyone made it out relatively intact. How is the staff holding out?


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## Steve Jung (May 11, 2006)

Nifft said:
			
		

> I didn't cut my way out of Ctulhu's gullet (which closed by way of muscular action) just to give up my post count.
> 
> In fact, I'll write post a pointless post right now.
> 
> -- N



Now that's just taunting.


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## Steve Jung (May 11, 2006)

Xer0 said:
			
		

> You know, I hate to ask this, but what's going to happen to those of us who became community supporters between December and now?  I had signed up about two months ago and now I've come back and (understandably) I'm back as a registered user and not as a supporter.



Yes, and as a bonus, the clock will be reset to whenever they re-enable it. http://www.enworld.org/showpost.php?p=2813334&postcount=3


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## MavrickWeirdo (May 11, 2006)

Latest word (it's not the best news) http://www.enworld.org/showpost.php...32&postcount=13


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## Xath (May 11, 2006)

Dog_Moon2003 said:
			
		

> I think hourly would be good.
> 
> But seriously, at least monthly.  Would prefer weekly, but honestly, I have no idea how long or what kind of work it takes to backup everything.  Although considering the size of this site, it can't be TOO easy.




Do you have any idea how much lag that would create?  I'd hazard a guess that backing up this site would take a good 16+ hours of good solid lag-time.


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## ceratitis (May 11, 2006)

hello all 
glad to see you all again, glad to be here 
while i lost many posts i really feel bad for the story hours, i mean 5 months worth wow. so much work goes into those and they are so good both to read and enjoy and learn about the game and stuff. man i hope thats all backed up somewhere *sigh*
Z


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## Piratecat (May 11, 2006)

Storyteller01 said:
			
		

> Good to hear that everyone made it out relatively intact. How is the staff holding out?



Tired and appreciative it wasn't worse. INCREDIBLY appreciative of Pooka, who stepped in to help Twin Rose when it was clear this was a multi-person job. Frustrated it happened in the first place. And introspective - we're reviewing what we need to do to make sure this never happens again. And good, thanks.  

It's good to have our home back, even if it's a little retro.


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## drothgery (May 11, 2006)

Xath said:
			
		

> Do you have any idea how much lag that would create?  I'd hazard a guess that backing up this site would take a good 16+ hours of good solid lag-time.




I'm sure there's ways of doing things faster than that; daily database backups of far larger sites than ENWorld (with a single db server) are pretty common. It might take some hardware that ENWorld doesn't presently have to do a fast backup, but I'm pretty sure it can be done.


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## Nightfall (May 11, 2006)

Hm maybe I need to shoot it again to see if it's healing properly...


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## Xath (May 11, 2006)

drothgery said:
			
		

> I'm sure there's ways of doing things faster than that; daily database backups of far larger sites than ENWorld (with a single db server) are pretty common. It might take some hardware that ENWorld doesn't presently have to do a fast backup, but I'm pretty sure it can be done.




Yeah, but how much do they cost?


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## Nightfall (May 11, 2006)

Costs more than me shooting it that's for sure.  *likes to believe he has the god-like power of killing things...*


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## barsoomcore (May 11, 2006)

Nightfall said:
			
		

> *likes to believe he has the god-like power of killing things...*



*likes to allow Nightfall the illusion of power... *


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## Nightfall (May 11, 2006)

Hey better the illusion than the real thing!


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## drothgery (May 11, 2006)

Xath said:
			
		

> Yeah, but how much do they cost?




Not much (it doesn't take very long to say, burn 2 GB to a DVD, which takes a <$1 DVD-R for each backup and a <$50 burner; tapes are faster, and hard drives faster still). The bottleneck with backups seems to be downloading the backup files for storage off-site ( which apparently takes TwinRose 20 hrs for 2 GB -- which means either ENWorld or TwinRose's ISP has bandwidth issues; it shouldn't take 20 hrs to download 2 GB on any broadband service worthy of the name ); if the backup device is local to ENWorld's servers, it's nowhere near as time consuming to make a backup.

Disclaimer: I'm not a sysadmin, don't play one on TV, and didn't stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night...


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## Nightfall (May 11, 2006)

Drog,

If you did I'd want your room then.


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## Nyaricus (May 11, 2006)

barsoomcore said:
			
		

> *likes to allow Nightfall the illusion of power... *



*likes to laugh at Nightfall*


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## Nightfall (May 11, 2006)

Eh I don't mind being laughed it. As long as I'm going for the joke. Which I am, of course.


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## IronWolf (May 12, 2006)

Xath said:
			
		

> Do you have any idea how much lag that would create?  I'd hazard a guess that backing up this site would take a good 16+ hours of good solid lag-time.




It shouldn't take near that long.  I don't know the exact size of the DB and can only guess from posts I have seen from Twin Rose and Spoony back in the day, but dumping the DB shouldn't take 16 hours.  While it is being backed up will the server slow down while it churns through the data?  Yep.  But it can be scheduled to occur at a time the server has a lesser load than it may have at other times.  And even then, it is a small price to pay for having backups to restore from.


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## Michael Morris (May 12, 2006)

There's two ways to backup the database. 1st (and the way I suspect chris is doing it) is mysqldump - which is slower than dog doo doo.  I abandoned that a long time ago in favor of mysqlhotcopy - which takes about 7 1/2 minutes to make a backup.


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## BSF (May 12, 2006)

Spoony Bard said:
			
		

> There's two ways to backup the database. 1st (and the way I suspect chris is doing it) is mysqldump - which is slower than dog doo doo.  I abandoned that a long time ago in favor of mysqlhotcopy - which takes about 7 1/2 minutes to make a backup.




Now that's hunky dory!  Hmm, can you actually run that without bringing down the boards too?  Mostly just wondering if it would be feasible to drop some scripts together on the server.  Maybe a perl or python script?  Heck, even just a shell script.  Schedule it in cron to dump the database to a seperate disk location.  Maybe even gzip it up to make is smaller.  (Assuming the server has the resources to successfully compress it.)  

For that matter, you could script it to shutdown the boards and restart them when it is finished.  That might be a little more tricky, but it is feasible.


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## Michael Morris (May 12, 2006)

No - Mysqlhotcopy locks and flushes the tables before it runs. It doesn't run any queries - it physically copies the data files out of the mysql directory and into the backup location.


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## BOZ (May 12, 2006)

i could see why the 7 1/2 minute deal would be more appealing than the 20-hour deal.


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## Rel (May 12, 2006)

BOZ said:
			
		

> i could see why the 7 1/2 minute deal would be more appealing than the 20-hour deal.




You lost me in all the technical jargon there, BOZ.


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## ssampier (May 14, 2006)

Nightfall said:
			
		

> It's doing better than I thought after I shot it.




Phhh.

Han shot first.


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## Jdvn1 (May 14, 2006)

Rel said:
			
		

> You lost me in all the technical jargon there, BOZ.



 Qwik iz gud.


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## Bront (May 14, 2006)

Spoony Bard said:
			
		

> No - Mysqlhotcopy locks and flushes the tables before it runs. It doesn't run any queries - it physically copies the data files out of the mysql directory and into the backup location.



I take it after you do that, you can download the copy, or simply remove older backups as you go?


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