Looks like the site is having database issues at the moment. Might have to restore from the last backup, which was yesterday. I’ll investiage shortly when I’ve got the tools for the job. It might just need a repair, it might need more.

Or I might just stick it on the “Can’t be arsed” pile.

Edit: From what I can gather, the server restarted about 6 hours ago and the stats table was goosed since then. The repair on the database took longer than expected, mainly due to the size of this stats table, but it appears to have survived with only a tiny amount of data being written off, certainly not enough to warrant restoring from a backup.

The site lives to fight another day! I bet you can’t wait for my next installation of shit music and lamp posts.

UPDATE: 5th Sep 19:47… Everything should be back to normal.

Gah. Sorry about the downtime for both of you who noticed it. It’s not often there’s downtime on one of the busiest times of the week. OK, I lie, I mean 2nd busiest times of the week… (You don’t really know how busy it gets on a Friday night do you? – Ed)

Er, no. Either way, there were probably some hits lost.

It all started at about 9:30. I went to make some changes to one of my wonderful databases, when it turned out I couldn’t connect. Odd.

Minutes later, the webhosts updated their status site with the following….

21.36: We are presently looking at an issue affecting
this server

Bimler, they were aware of the issue, and all I had to do now is sit back and wait for someone to flick the switch. Surely everything tech related is fixed by the old “turning it off and on again” routine.

I waited. And waited.

22:30: Engineers have now determined the cause of this fault
and are working to restore the system ASAP.
Services should be restored shortly.

That’s some fault if it took them 54 minutes to diagnose it. Still, shortly means shortly. I suppose all I had to do was sit here and twiddle my thumbs. Can’t be long now.

I waited. In my immense boredom, I watched two full episodes of “Scotland Tonight”, the Scottish 6PM News programme on ITV (or rather, STV). It was dire. In fact, half way through the second edition I promptly fell asleep at the computer desk.

I awoke to a full moon, shining through the stained glass windows of Mercuryvapour Towers, and a hopefully restored website.

00:25: Despite repeated attempts to restore the system, the
physical prohost1.34sp.com server cannot be correctly
accessed. We suspect a hardware related issue at this time.
As a result a standy box is now being brought online to
restore services. All data is stored on a highly redundant
central NAS system, so data is unaffected by the loss of
the orginal prohost1.34sp.com machine.

Well, it became clear that the “restored services” wasn’t going to be the case. Oddly, despite the fact the web / SQL access was kaput, email could still be received. This is quite ironic, seeing as the hosts don’t actually backup any email “free of charge”. Everything else is backed up every Wednesday.

Fearing the worst, this at least allowed me the opportunity to move the mailboxes to somewhere that never suffers any downtime at all – Gmail. Yes, yes, I know, I’m being facetious there, but that’s where the mail was moved to.

I fell asleep again.

This time I woke up at 3AM, and my lovely website responded to everything I threw at it. In fact, it had been like this for 90 minutes or so…

01:30: The server is now back online and all services
restored. No data has been affected as a result of this
fault.

And now, here you are, reading this website as if nothing ever happened. It’s made a hideous dent in my newly acquired pingdom status, however…

85.35%… I see.