Dungeon Master Forum

Just letting you all know that the forum will likley be going down for a day or two while I jump over to new space. Hopefully this little bit of down time will equal more stable service for the long term. It may also mean uploads.. but not sure about that yet.

We are going with ZPC after all.. I've found a reliable method of getting a hold of him so all is good. no bandwidth restrictions and 500 megs of space..
so no more.. "you have been banned.." crap

moo

Give woo! Give yay!

Don't forget to let me know when it's all happening so that I can take backups of the necessary stuff, especially the forum database. In fact, I'm quite happy to do this work if it's easier.

I assume you're moving the whole kaboodle over and getting ZPC to handle everything, such as domain name registration, etc? Once you know the IP address of the new space, even before the domain name is transferred, let me know and we can get things moving. When that happens, it might be best to remove the current homepage and forum homepage and put up a warning until everything has propagated.

I've taken the liberty of putting this message on the jumpsite and the encyclopaedia forums too

and 'yay'

Yay, bandwidth! Bandwidth will probably be lower than before, on account of the robots.txt. What a deal! 500 Mgs! Awesome. My thanks to the new host.

it's back up.. finally.. OMG.. that has been the most stressfull week of my life..

Can't appoligise enough for the down time. Some unforseen difficulties in getting things up and working.. let's hope it's up and stays up..

moo

Yah, some 'unforseen diffculties' indeed! I wasn't expecting the phpMyAdmin 2MB restrictions on this new host, so we had to ftp the forum database to a secure area and wait for the admins to do the installation on our behalf. At least it's all up and running now!

Personally, I wasn't bothered that it was down for a week. It's not like it's a commercial site or anything, and most people are regulars who knew what was going on. Plus a week away is probably a healthy thing considering how geeky we can all get....

Yes, i was able to spend my week fruitfully ...umm, broswing other websites.
Eh, at least it was enlightning po...art : )

Yeah, it was like a dungeon-master diet...

If there should be any problems, please, inform me asap. cows nows the way.

Cowsmanaut, Gambit and Equus / ZPC :

Thank you !

Is it possible now to upload dungeons on this site?

not yet.. but it will be. I have more space and bandwidth now.

I may make a new section just for that purpose. a sort of file browser but you will need to have an account and need to be authorised in order to use it. This way I don't have people abusing it because they just found some free space.

moo

Great to see the site back up! One week was not a big deal because we all knew what was happening.
When uploads are possible, we will be able to migrate the last forums from the Encyclopaedia to this place.

Will the 2MB limitation prevent us from periodically backuping the database? This would be a bad thing.

Backing up isn't the issue -- it's restoring that's a pain. When uploading a file to phpMySQLAdmin (or whatever it's called!) the maximum file size is 2MB at a time. Similarly, you can't copy and paste enough data into the SQL query box to make it usable.

It would be possible to cut up the database into several smaller files and save each one as a gzip compressed file and then upload them individually, but it's laborious and a pain in the ass.

I would prefer to have the full mySQL domain/IP/login details so that I can synchronise the databases directly from a backup on my home computer.

ZPC, can you provide me with this information?

gambit - I have already answered it to you, so again (and now it is confirmed) there is no remote access to database. security reasons.

The database is backed-up every 24 hours by the provider. But you can backup more often when you write some small php script that would do the painy work (and use CRON to run it every X Y) for you and e.g. send the gzipped file to your mail or so.

OK, I must have missed the security issue in your email. No problem.

Regarding backups -- that is not the problem. It's restoring that would be a pain. But hopefully, this won't ever need to be done again!

Can you please clarify your role in relation to the hosting provider? Are you the owner/admin? It's just that I asked you to let me know when the forums were back on line and I didn't hear anything from you. I had to visit the site and by chance they were running.

This is the same problem that we had with the previous host: not keeping us informed when things are done/changed/broken. That's why I'd like to know who is reponsible for this. I don't know what kind of deal you made with Cowsmanaut, and maybe it's not a 'normal' hosting package that you're providing. .

If you're not the admin, presumably someone emailed Cowsmanaut when the forums were re-enabled? Is that the case Cows? If so, can I get included in these emails seeing as I'm the person who does most of the admin around here?

Hope you can clarify. Thanks.

No.. I found out from your email that they were back up then got an email about a day or two later from ZPC informing me they were back up. That could simply be due to email delay.. either way I don't care much about that.. just that it was back up. I really just care that it stays up, and there are no major problems.

I like many people were checking the forums periodically.

Anyway.. perhaps it's just my exasperation over all of this stressfull change over but it seems to me like some kind of power struggle here. You are both great guys and all.. but it's like you both want to do everything yourselves. So I really hope this aspect is sorted out between you two. I think *BOTH* of you need to figure out what it is going to be to administer this new location and who can agree to do what...

moo

Trust me, it's no power struggle -- life's too short.

I'm simply confused as to why, when requested, I am not kept informed about what's going on. It's the very least I would expect from any provider, even if it's a "friendly" deal. That is why I have asked for clarification of who exactly is responsible for this hosting, and what level of service we can expect.

To be honest, if I can't even get that kind of information when I ask for it, I'll be disinclined to put the time into these forums that I used to. I got sick and tired of all the problems with the old hosts and not knowing what was going on, and I thought the move to a new host would solve this. If we have the same problems again, I'm not going to bust my balls to get them fixed if it's purely down to lack of communication.

ok .. well you let me know when it's getting to be an issue then.

moo

These forums are full of useful information and I always like to have an offline copy of important information from the Internet. So I would like to be able to periodically download backups of the forums database.

Before the move to this new provider, from time to time I made database backups myself as I had been given admin rights by Cowsmanaut.
I am not requesting admin rights here, just that someone with permission make a backup file available somewhere so that it can be downloaded.

Gambit, Equus, would it be possible to periodically send me a database backup (SQL text file), say once a month? (or provide a link to download such a backup)

Yes, that's no problem. I take regular backups (once or twice a week) and can email them to you Christophe.

On another note, has anyone else had any problems getting on these forums since they came back on? I've had three incidents of not being able to get on here, just get a "Dungeon-Master.com could not be found" message from Firefox. Can't remember dates and times of the first two, but the third was last night, 00:48 am GMT, I tried several times until 01:12 and gave up.

that's not ZPC's server though. That's the URL not being found which could be the DNS or it could be a glitch somewhere else. Again.. I've had no issues.. but I only check 2-3 times a day

moo

Same as cows, I've had no problems, but I'm checking about once at work and maybe twice back at home

OK, folks ... few info should do no harm...

The hosting company of this server is just the cheapest but still professional on Czech market. I found it more than year ago, and since then I am suggesting to all my friends and customers to move their domains here (www.ceskyhosting.cz) ... it's reliable, support is responding on all communication channels and the speed is fine... I have no profit from anything, I pay for all my domains and webspaces hosted by this company. So you figure that I am just one of many customers of this company, perhaps one with more contacts with the support guys because of the amount of administered domains but still a regular customer. Would that be enough for this topic?

Regarding the technical information, here is the tech info page:
http://www.ceskyhosting.cz/odstavky-a-vypadky.html
It is usualy issued the day the restart or short unavailability is planned for.
Notices of how long it took, reasons and stuff around is typed in red italic font.
Please note that in Czech we have Central European Time (GMT +1), the time here
is the same as the server ATLAS at here: http://cas.atlas.cz/ (row below "Vas pocitac"
is your computer time).
Btw it usually lasts for few seconds... sometimes few minutes.

Things around start of these forums: as we discussed (Gambit and me) I asked the
admins of the server if they could put the file with the db content into the database,
and they did it, I guess, on saturday night or sunday ... than I don't remember it very well,
I think I was somewhere off-line, and when I got on-line, the db was there but the
web wasn't working. So I set up the configuration file and it worked. Than I mailed
to Cows (and also maybe to Gambit, not sure). That's all...

Any other questions ... no problem to answer...

Anyway ... the PHP changed it's setup from Session.auto_start=on to off, I think it caused the email not being sent (when mailing to user)... please check ...

I can't resist to ask: so, Gambit, now when you have all the info (including the long email I sent you few weeks ago) about the possibilities this hosting offers, what do you want me to setup?

OK, guyz, there was a larger unavailability of the server cause of the Worm.Bagle ... as you can see, the server is currently running...

As I notified Cowsmanaut, there are already statistics available for this domain...

yeah I noticed this site got slow.. but I didn't notice actual down time.. Just some difficulty loading some pages as it would sometimes time out and I would try again and eventually get the page.

Thanks for the info though

moo

I still regularly get "www.dungeon-master.com could not be found" messages, usually most days when I try the site. If I try again a few minutes later, it seems OK.

This exact same thing used to happen to me a lot when it was hosted on the other hosts server. Seems very odd to me.... anyone have an explanation for that?

yeah your local switch or annother between you and the outside world is buggered.. contact your ISP. It's likley something to do with that overseas thing.. or... it could be that the name server (where I get my domain name from) is something you have trouble reaching.. (shrug) I've never had that happen to me at all ever.. even when the site has been down. ... oh wait I did get it once.. a long time ago..

moo

gambit37 - might be problem of your DNS server (depending on ISP or local network)

cows - regarding the emails - yep, the database was down ("..because of administration mistake." - I hope that guy just got fired.) ... some folks called me too...

Still getting the DNS problems on a regular basis: doesn't anyone else get that in the UK?

Also, site was down from Sat eve to Sunday morning for me -- would try and load but nothing would happen, even though the browser said that it had loaded ("Done"). Tried FTP login too and nothing there either.

the site was fine saturday for me until ~9.30 (went to bed!)
i couldn't get to the site early sunday morning, but then again i was only quickly up at 4am and tried once...seemed fine by the time i got up properly ~9

It was down a short while here in Wisconsin. The DNS was OK.