PriusChat Outage - The Inside Scoop

As most of you know from trying to visit us Saturday through this evening, PriusChat has been down for an extended period of time. Yes, I payed the server bills, yes, I fed the gerbils that keep the server going this month. Unforunately, this outage was completely out of my hands.

I was awoken Saturday morning by a call from our host (1&1) letting me know that they had pulled the server off of the backbone switch due to a security threat coming from our server. Apparently someone was using the server to start a Denial of Service attack against other servers. In plain english, our server was being naughty and our host had to put it in the time-out corner.

I've never had fear spread through my body as quickly as when the tech support guy said they needed me to fax in a letter stating they can re-image the server. "Wait," I said, clamming up. "Will reimaging it erase all of my data?" I already knew the answer. "Yes," I was informed by 1&1. "We need to reimage the server to eradicate any security holes that may have opened up." Now, I keep backups, but was never prepared for catastrophic data loss.

After I got my wits back about me, I called 1&1 back and asked if there was anyway I could retrieve data from the server. "Sure, we'll set it up in safe mode." Fabulous, I can get all the data off and we'll be good. "It won't let me log in via FTP, what are my other options?" I asked with more of a 'I'm pissed off and want to get to my data' tone than a polite question tone. They then semi-instructed me how to do it (by the way, Google is the best tech-support desk known to man) and I was off.

That's when I realized how much data there is on this server. We share this server with a associate of mine who runs a photo website. Well, the combination of our sites (PC & a few others I'm working on stay tuned) is a size of over 25 gigs. Uh, it takes a long time to download 25 gigs. Especially on a cable modem. Especially when you're freaking out because you want to get a site back up that you've worked a year on.

So all day Saturday & all day Sunday I was downloading, downloading, downloading. Finally this morning I was ready to have 1&1 reimage the server and back at square 1 we began. You think it takes a long time to download 25 gigs via cable modem? Try uploading it back. This time I was smart. I burned everything to DVD, opened up 3 various transfer utilities at work and remotely connected to my home PC and uploaded from there as well. So if something's missing, don't worry, it'll be back, it's just uploading at like 40 k/b per sec. Uggg.

So I get into PriusChat - yay! - but there are problems - oh no! - that I won't bore you with - thank god! - that are now rectified.

I'm happy to report that PriusChat is now back up without any data loss. I appreciate the kind emails that were dropped my way (if you sent them between Sat & this afternoon my email was down but now you can resend them ) and the great things said about PriusChat around the Net the last few days. Your patience & loyalty make all of this work worth it.

Thank you all.

Danny

 

Update: I know about the speed issues, I'm going to look into it. It's good to see we have 50 people online right now. And I was worried no one would want to come back to PC!