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Sabotage

Head Rambles Posted on by

We had a bit of a disaster last night on this here site.

The database blew up.

It’s the first time this has happened in six years, so that isn’t bad going?

Now the problem was that the database has copies of itself lying around on the laptop here, including a copy that was made just before the explosion.  So when the blast happened I got in touch with the Other Fella and he set about copying the copy back onto the site.

That’s when the trouble really started.

The copy was a dud.

It wouldn’t copy.

Bits of it were OK so it was a question of finding the bits that were OK and nailing them to another copy that was a bit older.  Fucking messy.  And what was worse, when all the bits were tacked together they mad a file that was too big to upload, so the file had to be broken into smaller bits.

The site is sort of hobbling along at the moment.  There may be bits that don’t work, but the main stuff seems to be OK.

Today we have to try to find out what caused the explosion.  This means poking around in the debris, which may mean the site pops up and down a bit today.  Was the explosion accidental?  Far more likely it was deliberate sabotage in which case we have to find the culprit.

Now who could I possibly have offended over the last six years?

 

Comments

Sabotage — 19 Comments

  1. Now who could I possibly have offended over the last six years?

    Well…everyone? Except me, of course. I was offensive to begin with.

  2. To be honest, it would be easier to list the people who you haven't offended i.e. The Womens Institute, Girl Guides and my Aunty Vera, but that might be just because you haven't got around to them yet, but we won't hold that against you.  There is only so much one person can do in six years.

     

    Hope you get warp drive back soon.

    • I'm not that offensive am I?  And I could have sworn there was a mention of your Aunty Vera a while ago?

  3. Same as the above.

     

    Mind you, with the legions of the professionally offended that seem to make up a large proportion of society today, it's nigh on impossible not to offend some thin-skinned soul somewhere, whatever you say.

     

    I note you seem to have lost all your previous comments in the explosion. I wonder if you'll find their shattered remains as you pick through the debris.

  4. Bugger!!

    OK.  I think I have restored everything.  There were indeed some comments missing and I have managed to restore most of 'em.  The only thing that's missing now as far as I can tell is my responses to yesterday's comments.  No great loss there?

    I really am getting pissed off with this yoke breaking every five minutes!

    • Captain GD, the Warp Drive is on-line, but she may not hold sir, oh, and the W.I. are a bunch of old nosey biddies and the Girl Guides, well best not to mention them at all.  Oh, Aunty Vera, well the postman says she goes like a steam train!

       

      There, everything sorted.  Heh, heh.

      • And why would I need to insult your Aunty Vera when you do such an excellent job yourself!  😀

    • I now have about twenty backups floating around the place.  Herself just tripped over one which led to some fairly coarse language [I don't know where she gets words like that].  And the dog is chewing one in the corner.  I'm going to have to get the old vacuum out at this rate.

      I have a bit of a thing about this "cloud" yoke.  It always seems a bit up in the air?  Do I want my vital files floating around the atmosphere?

  6. I take it that you have cron jobs setup for database backups? If not, then, I'm fucking offended! Seriously though GD a similar thing happened to me about two years ago for a business site and it floored us as our DB backup was also corrupted! We even went so far as to hire a forensic data recovery company, who were as much use as tits on a fish!

    Now we run a raid 10 array with a load balancer between three servers and also a stand alone baby server that is used just for DB backups.

    I know that you are not running a business but surely your Google adsense campaign can afford at least five more servers now that you are coining it in!

    • Er …  yes ….  possibly?  It's set to email me a copy of the database every day if that's what you mean?  And why would you be offended anyway?  Afraid I will lose your pearls of wisdom?  No chance.

      As for my Google Account – Mwaaahahahahaha!  Another couple of months and I may be able to buy one of those little USB stick things…..

      • Now that you have won the champion of all Ireland in the blogosphere, you must be loaded ye old git!

        I'm offended coz I say I am, Gardai arrest that database killer!

  7. Re;Above

    Last job I worked in GD the database was stored on a separate secure server to the main website server. The idea being certain types might hack into your website depending on your web security but can't get into your database. It seemed to work alright too. Sometimes a customer would ring me up looking for a copy of their database and I would send off for it. I assume the database backup server was separate as well because the tech had to go else where to retrieve the database copy.  I hope this breaks it down for you a bit more…

    • I am reliably informed that the site and the database are indeed on different servers.  I am also reliably informed by my technical advisor that the site is reasonably secure. Apparently there are all sorts of little [and not so little] man-traps all over the place.

      There have been many attempts to break in here and to date only one was partially successful – they managed to redirect Google over to a porn server!

  8. I have no doubt that your database is huge by this point. Mine went mad back in the spring. I ended up having to restore the entire site, but given the lax frequency of my post, I didn’t lose much.

    By the way, two thumbs up on the new site layout. I have gotten into the habbit of reading blog posts through RSS readers, so I don’t lurk as much as I used to. 🙂

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