BeyondUnreal is down!

[GreatEmerald]

This is the second time in the last few days I see BeyondUnreal and all of it's hosted sites off-line for database issues. Anyone know why is it happening? I can't even browse the forums or upload anything to NaliCity :-/

[Leo T_C_K]

I bet someone is hacking it.

[GreatEmerald]

That's a database error, what kind of hacking can be that? Databases can get corrupt after some time, but that's easy to fix.

Wait a min, it's on again?

[Leo T_C_K]

It can be theoretically "hacking", or done on purpose by someone.

[GreatEmerald]

We are currently experiencing some issues with our database server, and thus the majority of areas of the site are completely non-functional. We have a call in to ServerCave (our host) and should be back sooner than later. We are very sorry for the inconvenience and hope to be back before long!

UPDATE: We are still down. For those interested to know, we had two drives die in our database server over the weekend. Fortunately, we were able to salvage a fairly recent backup. Now we just have to wait for ServerCave to get us new drives in there and get the machine set back up, and we should be back in business.

That's their internal problem, I think.

[JD]

Fortunately, we were able to salvage a fairly recent backup.

Thank god. The original notice posted on the site said that the only available backup was two years old. I couldn't believe that a professional website as large as BeyondUnreal wouldn't have a recent if not daily backup available. I also don't believe that their servers don't have drive mirroring or raid with parity. SATA drives are relatively cheap and hardware RAID is built into just about every motherboard. Why not spend a little more and make use of RAID to recover more quickly from such drive failures?

[Hyper]

I think this whole story emphasizes the importance of a good backup again. You can't solely depend on RAID for data availability.

[JD]

I think this whole story emphasizes the importance of a good backup again. You can't solely depend on RAID for data availability.

I didn't mean solely rely on RAID, but RAID should certainly be the first defense.  It's rare that all critical drives in an RAID array will fail at once, and in a mirroring configuration, drive failure won't automatically take the site offline.  Even rebuilding an array is quicker than restoring a backup. In the original BeyondUnreal notice, it sounded like the site had nothing but a two-year old backup.

[GreatEmerald]

Woah, now they say:

As you know, BeyondUnreal has been down for a few days and we wanted to bring you up to date on the situation. This weekend, we suffered multiple simultaneous drive failures, including the drive with our database backup. Thankfully, after a great effort we've been able to recover a lot of the database by salvaging what we could and from older independant backups. Unfortunately, we did lose all of 2007 and part of 2006 from the forums. New drives are on order and when they arrive will need to be installed and we anticipate being up a few hours after that.

IMPORTANT NOTICE TO HOSTED SITE ADMINS
You MUST contact us if you have data stored in the database that you would like us to recover. It is a difficult and annoying process to retrieve anything from the corrupted data, so PLEASE get ahold of us ASAP if you have data that was created later than May 23, 2006 that you need to have us attempt to recover for you.

Even though such a catastrophic simultaneous failure was really unforseeable, we want to apologize to all the readers, forum members, and especially our incredible hosted sites for the downtime. All the same we are escalating our disaster preparedness and going forward our host has agreed to make backups independant of our server farm. It's highly unlikely for multiple drives to fail simultaneously even once - let alone twice, but this will help insulate us should it ever happen again. We look forward to getting back to serving the Unreal community and, barring nuclear attack or act of God, carrying on without interruption.

That is certainly not good. What about the forums and NaliCity?! Though I'm sure the forums will be recovered, but not as sure for the NaliCity...

[fxsr789]

As long as their "Fileworks" archive is still intact the moment they get everything set back up, I'll be a little bit happy. I hope that NaliCity is not totally trashed either, I forgot to download a certain map, then this B.S. occurred. Now I'll never know if the maps I need will still be there the moment everything gets fixed.

- Fenix

[Tronovision]

Since we're on the topic of backups, does someone know what is the best way to back up your website files for the fastest recovery? (I can imagine that restoring a website to be hairpulling maddness, especially if you have a database driven one that relies on a very specific file directory structure). Sorry this is not exactly Unreal related, but does affect Unreal websites...

[DieHard SCWS]

Reading on the mainpage from Beyond Unreal its a shame they lost that amount of data.

The retarded part is having the backups sitting in the same databox instead of having it located in a different section from the datacenter. The backup is there to deal with unforseen situations, and the fact they lost the backup too is pretty stupid. Backups should NEVER run from the same system. If the powersupply burns out, it can easelly take out all drives connected with them. And i asume something similar has happened.

Since we're on the topic of backups, does someone know what is the best way to back up your website files for the fastest recovery?

All admins here store their stuff at home, which is pretty risky, but probably the best way is to simply copy all content to a second drive, and not use any striping or RAID. The RAID offered in current MoBo's is insuficient and actually pretty useless to prevent data loss.

Use a seperate drive and if possible store it somewhere else in the case your house burns down, or the comp got stolen in a burglary. And i admid, i dont have the money to do that, but if i had any ill do it in a blinck of an eye.


I do have 2 new drives, each 500 MB (2 x 365 in reality  ::) (means i got cheated for 70 gig LMAO)) oné drive is used to backup all my stuff, and the other drive is sitting in another sytem on a seperate powersupply and serves as a secondary backup. And i manually copy paste the backups.

NTFS or FAT32, plain said NTFS completelly sucks to the bone. I HAVE to use NTFS because of the large drives, and yes since i started using NTFS i almost loose files on a weekly base due to the filesystem NTFS uses. It by defination currupts files and partitions. NTFS sucks, if you use smaller drives your way better of with fat32 wich has prooven it cannot corrupt files ever.

I know, i know, off topic




Still sad they lost that amount of data.....................
.
.
.

[GreatEmerald]

Yes, NTFS is really not good, but FAT has limitations. That's why many servers run on Linux as their EXT file systems are very reliable and the system doesn't even need to be restarted or anything to work flawlessly and it lags a lot less.

No news from BeyondUnreal. FileWorks still off-line (http://official.beyondunreal.com/dl.php/official/unreal/# ), Liandri off-line, forums off-line, NaliCity off-line.
[img]http://www.unrealtexture.com/Unreal/Website/Projects/SGCProject/AAAMedia/CTFRed_Large.gif[/img]

[GreatEmerald]

Forums back on-line!
Liandri back on-line!
UEd Wiki back on-line!
NaliCity off-line.
FileWorks off-line.

Forums are reset to 2006 May... Really, really NOT GOOD. Liandri is restoring from this year! Not sure about the wiki.

[lycheeliang]

well nalicity is now online..kindof. i can access the search page only lol . Forum can be accessed but i can't login...seem like those registered after the last server backup(i.e. after may 2006) would not be able to login...

[GreatEmerald]

At least I can't access the main page. And yes, I had to register again there :-/

[GreatEmerald]

NaliCity back on-line.
FileWorks back on-line.
Base defences on-line.

[DieHard SCWS]

NaliCity back on-line.
FileWorks back on-line.
Base defences on-line.

Maybe add the links to your post
.
.
.

[GreatEmerald]

NaliCity: http://nalicity.beyondunreal.com/
FileWorks: http://download.beyondunreal.com/
The last statement was a joke, that is what they say when your power gets back on in Red Alert 2.

[DieHard SCWS]

When you made previous post i was curious, because i needed files for the new website, and its a pitty that they had the crash just in front of the downloads i wanted to do. I need all maps and mods for UT and UT2004.

Meant i went to Nalicity and sure enough what i was afraid off, all downloads are gone..... Links are there, but downloads nope...


If i wouldnt have had the problems with my own computer, they could have restored all files from my new site. Now i am downloading all content from FileFront, but i doubt they will have everything NaliCity had.
.
.
.