Apologies for downtime - we've moved to a new host

[ultragaijin]

The old host of this site went inexplicably offline a few days ago, taking down hundreds, if not thousands, of customers and sites. We're still waiting to hear an explanation.

Now that we have a new host, I've been working from the most recent backups to restore FG. Unfortunately, a week's worth of posts and new accounts have been lost.

If you registered within the last week, please sign up again. You can use the same username and settings as the first time you signed up.

The configuration of the new server is different from before, so you registered users who want to use cookies to stay logged in should delete any "fuckedgaijin.com" or "forums.fuckedgaijin.com" cookies and clear your browser caches before logging in to the new site.

I took the opportunity to upgrade the board to the latest version, so some old quirks may gone. Let's hope there are not too many new ones.

Certain links may not work and the original FG front page site is gone, along with the weblinks. I'll try to set up a new web links system and restore as many of the old entries as soon as possible.

[ultragaijin]

Today it seems exceptionally slow. If possible, can you please post pings to the site, to give me an idea how it's loading elsewhere?

[ultragaijin]

Well, we may have to move again. :? The connection is looking pretty spotty right now.

Bear with me for now, I'm going to give these guys a few days. I'm actually in contact with them and they say they're having a router problem. Let's hope they can fix it soon.

With all you bit-pushers out there, does anyone happen to have some spare server space you could donate to the cause? Please let me know if you do.

[Steve Bildermann]

I' M BACK !!!!!!!!!

Ultra, this downtime has be very stressful for me. Not good for a man in my mental condition. 8O

In the end I suspected the supermarket checkout lady of causing the f*** gaijin site crash.

Well OK maybe I wrong BUT I still have my suspicions about her. That LCD register she has can certainly access the internet so I'll be keeping an eye on her. :roll:

In future do you think you could put up a custom 404 saying something like

IT'S OK STEVE. WE WILL BE BACK.

That would help a lot.

[ultragaijin]

I' M BACK !!!!!!!!!

Ultra, this downtime has be very stressful for me. Not good for a man in my mental condition. 8O

<snip>

In future do you think you could put up a custom 404 saying something like

IT'S OK STEVE. WE WILL BE BACK.

That would help a lot.

Trust me, brother, I was in as much pain as you were. OH LORD, how I wish I could've put up some kind of message - but such is the nature of this beast we call the WWW. I transferred the DNS as soon as I could, but it still took a couple days to get out to the faithful.

[ultragaijin]

And the worst of it is, your classic exchange with that loon from football365 may be lost forever...(I'm crossing my fingers and hoping beyond hope that someday I will recover the now legendary "missing week".)

[ultragaijin]

It looks like my old host may be back online now, so I'm going to try to recover the data now. The next hurdle will be trying to integrate the old and new sites. :crazy3: Needless to say, I will be monkeying around with things tonight.

Pray for me.

[ultragaijin]

Okay, the host isn't really back up, but the company that actually has the servers is being gracious:

In an effort to help those displaced by Hosting Company, Data Center has TEMPORARILY turned back on the former servers that served Hosting Company in an effort to allow those that had data on these servers that was not backed up to retrieve their data so that they do have a copy.

Originally, we set a deadline of 6pm when the servers would be shut back down. We have extended this deadline to 8AM Thursday morning when the servers will be powered down, restored, and made available for sale.

To all of the dozens of folks who emailed Data Center and myself personally on this matter, I regret that we were not able to do this sooner.

If you have data on one of the affected servers, make a copy of your data now. By 8AM tomorrow morning, it will be too late.

[ultragaijin]

All the missing posts have now been restored as best as ultragaijinly possible. Now you can all go back and enjoy your old masterpieces.

The good news is, you should be able to search or "find all posts by <username>" and the restored posts should be properly listed along with the others.

The bad news is, a perfect 100% restore wasn't possible. The most obvious problem is that the posting dates are wrong. The dates reflect the time they were restored, not when they were originally posted on the old board. The other thing is that the posts won't be included in your total post count (as far as I can tell).

If you notice any other oddities that I haven't mentioned, please point them out.

Some of the restored threads may have links referencing incorrect thread numbers, due to differences between the old and restored post numbers. Let me know about those errors too, so I can fix them.

Now, all I have to do is restore the rest of the Web Links...

[ultragaijin]

^bump for those who missed it. (details above)