Outage

[zoneminder]

[This was original posted yesterday and some of you may have seen it then, explanation below]

I would like to apologise for the site outage over the last few days. On Thursday I was given a days notice that my server was being moved 50 miles between data-centres along with all it's friends on Friday night. The expected downtime was supposed to be 2 hours, however it's now nearly five days. It appears as if the server did not survive the trip unfortunately.

So I have had to do a very quick and dirty migration of the site to another box which, fortunately, I had on standby. This means that it is highly possible that there will be areas of the site that do not function properly. For instance the Wiki restore yesterday was particular scary. If you see any problems please report them here.

Apologies also if you have tried to get in touch over that period as the server also held my mail and I have only just got that back up. If you have sent me something and not had a reply then please resend it. Even if I acknowledged receipt I have probably been a bit too busy to actually do anything. Feel free to send a reminder if I forgot to do anything for anyone.

The good news, if there is any, is that this box has a lot more umph than the old one and so the site should be quicker and more resilient The bad news is that in a month or two this one gets moved to the other data-centre as well So fingers crossed for that and I will try and post a warning if I get more notice.

The other complication is that while I was configuring the site on this new box yesterday, the old server came up briefly somehow. Unfortunately this coincided with me addressing a lot of posts and I was unaware that I was actually on the old server, which has now gone again. This means that some of you may have had a notification of a reply that actually no longer exists. I will try and re-address those posts if I can remember what they were but otherwise, for the short term only, you can add an additional post to flag where I answered but the answer has now gone.

All in all, rather a hellish weekend and first half of the week but I think pretty much everything survived and we can hopefully look forward to a period of stability going forward.

Thanks for your pateience.

Phil

[MJN]

Good to have it back!

For instance the Wiki restore yesterday was particular scary. If you see any problems please report them here.

I made my first ever Wiki edit and whilst the article got updated I did receive the following error:

A database query syntax error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was:

(SQL query hidden)

from within function "SearchMySQL4::update". MySQL returned error "145: Table './wiki_zoneminder/searchindex' is marked as crashed and should be repaired (localhost)".

As I said, first edit so feel free to blame me for breaking something...

Mathew

[Flash_]

Thanks for your hard work Phill - always a scary moment when the site for one of your favourite apps goes bye-bye, not only do you lose the support and help section, you start wondering if it's gone for good.

Big relief to have it back and we appreciate the work you've done.

[TimboUK]

Three cheers for all your hard work Phil



I also started thinking you were gone for good!

[cordel]

Four Cheers

[jameswilson]

five

[zoneminder]

Thanks for your comments.

Fortunately, once I made the decision to shift the site, it went off relatively easy. There are still a few gremlins but fingers crossed. It took a little longer than expected primarily because I had to focus on 'work' sites hosted on the machine before I could start on ZM.

Although I had backups of nearly everything I think, I may consider setting up a hot standby machine so I can switch over more easily in the future if the same thing happens.

[clinct]

I don’t think apologies are needed. For a non commercial self funded & supported product I think you (everyone) are doing an awesome job. This site, the product, and the support community behind it are top notch, and often rival the commercial market. Keep up the good work, we all appreciate it.