What Happened?
On Tuesday evening, our server's hard drive began to fail, which led to the corruption of our database. Unaware at the time that the hard drive was failing, we did an initial fix on Tuesday night, but errors and other problems persisted on Wednesday and into Thursday morning.
After discovering the need to replace the hard drive on Thursday morning, we closed the forums down and began the process of replacing the drive today around 5:00PM EST.
Since then we have been working non-stop to setup, configure, and restore the site and move all data to the new hard drive.
Why Did This Happen?
We don't have a rock solid explanation at this time as to why the hard drive would fail---It was about 5 months old. We consider it a freak incident.
Was Any Data Lost?
Unfortunately, approximately 200-250 active user accounts were corrupted and removed in our database rebuild. All posts by those users will no longer be associated with the poster names, but the actual content of the messages will still be available through searching and in threads.
Additionally, all posts from July 2nd-July 3rd were lost. We estimate this at approximately 600-800 messages.
On the plus side, we have verified that all current posts and users are clean and free of corruption.
How Will I be Affected?
Threads and messages posted by affected users will appear as unregistered posts with the username 'Poster' ... this was the best fix we could come up with, to get the posts back into the database and free of corruption.
It seems that users who have registered in the past 5 months are most likely to be affected.
<font color="brown">If you are getting a 'Username Does Not Exist' error</font> when trying to login, then you are probably among the 200-250 affected posters. Many of you already re-registered on July 2nd-3rd, but unfortunately you will have to re-register once more.
Click here for instructions if your account has been lost.
The Future
It has always been our goal to provide an extremely reliable service to our users, and this outage is certainly uncharacteristic of TractorByNet.com. We do what we can to prevent downtime, but sometimes it just isn't in our hands.
Again, thank you for your patience and understanding. We're ready to get back to talking about tractors now! /forums/images/graemlins/smirk.gif
If you get any errors, please report them in this thread.
On Tuesday evening, our server's hard drive began to fail, which led to the corruption of our database. Unaware at the time that the hard drive was failing, we did an initial fix on Tuesday night, but errors and other problems persisted on Wednesday and into Thursday morning.
After discovering the need to replace the hard drive on Thursday morning, we closed the forums down and began the process of replacing the drive today around 5:00PM EST.
Since then we have been working non-stop to setup, configure, and restore the site and move all data to the new hard drive.
Why Did This Happen?
We don't have a rock solid explanation at this time as to why the hard drive would fail---It was about 5 months old. We consider it a freak incident.
Was Any Data Lost?
Unfortunately, approximately 200-250 active user accounts were corrupted and removed in our database rebuild. All posts by those users will no longer be associated with the poster names, but the actual content of the messages will still be available through searching and in threads.
Additionally, all posts from July 2nd-July 3rd were lost. We estimate this at approximately 600-800 messages.
On the plus side, we have verified that all current posts and users are clean and free of corruption.
How Will I be Affected?
Threads and messages posted by affected users will appear as unregistered posts with the username 'Poster' ... this was the best fix we could come up with, to get the posts back into the database and free of corruption.
It seems that users who have registered in the past 5 months are most likely to be affected.
<font color="brown">If you are getting a 'Username Does Not Exist' error</font> when trying to login, then you are probably among the 200-250 affected posters. Many of you already re-registered on July 2nd-3rd, but unfortunately you will have to re-register once more.
Click here for instructions if your account has been lost.
The Future
It has always been our goal to provide an extremely reliable service to our users, and this outage is certainly uncharacteristic of TractorByNet.com. We do what we can to prevent downtime, but sometimes it just isn't in our hands.
Again, thank you for your patience and understanding. We're ready to get back to talking about tractors now! /forums/images/graemlins/smirk.gif
If you get any errors, please report them in this thread.
