The main website http://www.sydenham.org.uk and the forum http://forum.sydenham.org.uk are currently located on two different servers. Later this week we plan to move and converge them onto one of our new and more powerful servers.
Hopefully this will be completely transparent to you. However we ain't perfect and some ISPs cache information as to where servers are located. So there is a strong possibility that for some of you a part of the site could disappear for a day or so.
Don't panic! If you can't reach sydenham.org.uk you should find the latest update at www.sydenham.eu.
Admin
WARNING - We are moving servers
Not a transparent transfer I'm afraid.
I had already moved three other forums smoothly. So I was a bit over confident Friday night thinking it might all be over in 45 minutes. It took 15 sleepless hours and at one stage I feared we might lose most of the postings here.
Basically the backup from the old server refused to restore on the new server. The Forum software phpBB runs on an mySQL database. When I tried to get at it with some SQL tools it said the original database was corrupt. Googling around I found some hacks to try and sort the situation. At the same time I was switching DNS and DNS records which is a bit like turning a supertanker. When you panic and try and switch back - it continues to swing for another four hours ... overnight observers trying http://forum.sydenham.org.uk/ will have been delivered a variety of pages and none from three different servers.
Eventually on Saturday afternoon the new server suddenly accepted one of the backups. By this time I didn't care which - so any post after leaf's at 00:30 will have been lost. Neither am I sure why it eventually worked except possibly because I tried an ancient Windows 2000 PC with a download interface of the same vintage as the original database. But there you are - its on the new server in Dallas and I can stand down the old Houston server tomorrow.
I never did complete the original idea of converging the Forum with the main website which resides on another of our Houston based servers. Which means I wil have to have another go over Christmas. Also the RSS feeds need to be put back in - which is why there is no 'latest posts' on the frontpage. Give me a couple more days and I'll try and sort.
The old server served us faithfully for over four years - so I hope this new server will still be delivering STF in 2011! The current 5,000+ postings database is currently 25Mb. I wonder what it will be then ...
Admin
I had already moved three other forums smoothly. So I was a bit over confident Friday night thinking it might all be over in 45 minutes. It took 15 sleepless hours and at one stage I feared we might lose most of the postings here.
Basically the backup from the old server refused to restore on the new server. The Forum software phpBB runs on an mySQL database. When I tried to get at it with some SQL tools it said the original database was corrupt. Googling around I found some hacks to try and sort the situation. At the same time I was switching DNS and DNS records which is a bit like turning a supertanker. When you panic and try and switch back - it continues to swing for another four hours ... overnight observers trying http://forum.sydenham.org.uk/ will have been delivered a variety of pages and none from three different servers.
Eventually on Saturday afternoon the new server suddenly accepted one of the backups. By this time I didn't care which - so any post after leaf's at 00:30 will have been lost. Neither am I sure why it eventually worked except possibly because I tried an ancient Windows 2000 PC with a download interface of the same vintage as the original database. But there you are - its on the new server in Dallas and I can stand down the old Houston server tomorrow.
I never did complete the original idea of converging the Forum with the main website which resides on another of our Houston based servers. Which means I wil have to have another go over Christmas. Also the RSS feeds need to be put back in - which is why there is no 'latest posts' on the frontpage. Give me a couple more days and I'll try and sort.
The old server served us faithfully for over four years - so I hope this new server will still be delivering STF in 2011! The current 5,000+ postings database is currently 25Mb. I wonder what it will be then ...
Admin