TolkienAcrossTheWater forum reinstated

[berelinde]

Some of you may know about my forum, TolkienAcrossTheWater. Well, today has been an avalanche of foul-ups that ended with the deletion of the entire forum.

 

First, I installed a bugged skin that locked me out of my own forum. In an attempt to fix that, I installed an upgrade to the forum software that led to a fatal corruption of the database. With no choices remaining, I deleted the database. I'll rebuild it, but not today.

[Shaitan]

Sorry to hear. There's always a lot of time consumed in that stuff. I hope you get it up and working again.

[jastey]

That is bad. Good luck and a lot of motivation!

[Jarno Mikkola]

[berelinde]

Well, good news. I was able to repair the database and the forum is up and running again. I finally did something right.

[Ankhesenpaaten]

Berelinde, you do LOTS of things right! Anyway, glad to hear it is back up again. Especially since I just recently started visiting it...

[Jarno Mikkola]

Eeh, the forum seems to be down again, or something, it gives me this:

Can't open file: 'smf_messages.MYD'. (errno: 144)

The main page does show up, so it's just the forum, and it was up after the last time...

 

Just informing this here so B can take a look.

[berelinde]

Yeah, there's some kind of database error. I didn't do anything to the site, so I have no idea what's going on. Unfortunately, this is a really bad weekend for me due to RL commitments, but I'll see if I can get it sorted soon.

[berelinde]

Google to the rescue. Turns out it was a simple one-line fix through myPHPadmin. I still don't know what happened or why, but if it happens again, at least I know what to do.

[Miloch]

Cool, but next time for the rescue, don't use google, use scroogle. Why? Google is evil. (Scroogle is a stripped-down version of Google that will tell you why.)

[berelinde]

Hey, cool. Didn't even know that existed.

[berelinde]

TolkienAcrossTheWater forums are down again. It's the same error, but the fix I used last time isn't working this time, so I'm going to have to try to get some support from SMF. Blech.

[berelinde]

After a great deal of head scratching and even more bafflement, I was able to restore a backup for the TATW forums... kind of. My host decided to do massive upgrades at precisely the same time as the forum suffered catastrophic database failure, so the end result was that the forum went kaboom.

 

I was able to restore some degree of functionality, but any post made since February is lost forever, the forum skins are completely hosed, and the graphics directory seems to have become FUBAR. In other words, it works, more or less, but it's ugly as hells. For those of you that don't already know this, I'm not exactly a computer genius. MySQL makes my head explode. I'll probably get this sorted out eventually, but it isn't really my highest priority right now.

 

Edit: Got the forum skins sorted and the graphics directory, so it isn't quite so ugly anymore. The smileys still aren't restored and there's nothing I can do about the lost posts, but at least things are pretty much back to normal.