Saturday the 11th of September, 2010, our server’s hard drive suffered from multiple errors, prompting us to have it replaced. During this time, we also made the decision to switch from our Debian and DirectAdmin backend, to the much more powerful CentOS and cPanel/WHM backend. After having a new drive installed, we immediately began to try grabbing our data off the old drive, only to find it was completely dead. Fortunately, Logan had made backups of our most important data, that being every MySQL Database on the server, as well as the files for the Wiki, SVN, Message Board and Main Site. Unfortunately, this has meant the loss of quite a few files, including the IRC Bot Crawla, which took a great deal of time to code, due to complex Regular Expressions and other conditionals, as well as every site other than the aforementioned three.
This held us back by quite a bit, and it is only now that we have finally finished rebuilding and configuring the setup. Mystic insisted I get the site up as soon as possible, so I have done that, the Message Board and Wiki will follow soon, there are various settings that need to be changed to make them work perfectly on the new server, due to changes in the file structure (i.e. my username has been changed, so now vBulletin is going to be looking in the wrong path).
We apologise for the downtime, hopefully this will be the last substantial piece of downtime in a long, long time. Don’t worry, this hasn’t held back future releases of SRB2, our private development is done off our own server, so it was not affected by this week’s maintenance and data loss.
The game servers, unfortunately, were not backed up, we will be speaking with sb, the maintainer of the Team Fortress 2 server, and we will hopefully have that back soon. In the meantime, please feel free to visit the IRC Chatroom.
