Back from the Brink

Well, the server had a hard drive failure and I decided that it was time for an operating system upgrade. Unfortunately in the last 9 years everything had changed, e.g. the new versions of php and drupal and mysql were all incompatible with the old versions, and in various ways.

You can imagine my horror when I realized just how much work would be involved in salvaging the forum and make it usable again. I thought all I could do is make the drupal mysql file available to the web and figure out a way of upgrading later.

Finally as a last ditch effort I remembered the Ultimate Boot CD which has a hard drive cloning program and it was able to copy all the sectors still readable to another hard drive. The fact that the critical files were readable and there were multiple kernels bootable on the old failing hard drive was enough to get the server to at least boot, and I was able to restore the last missing files from another backup.

From now on I promise to snapshot the entire hard drive of the server at least once a year (as well as backing up all the data of course). I had really pushed my luck with the old hard drive which was made in 2002, but I'm pleased to say it there was a happy ending as you can see :)

Mark

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Re: Back from the Brink

Hello Mark,

I just wanted to let you know, when I tried to access some of these pages, my StopZilla anti-virus program halted the loading, and presented a dialog box suggesting the page I was about to visit had been known to push malware onto users' machines. Hopefully this is not the case, of course, but you might want to look into this and see if somewhere in this domain that has happened in the past. If it has been corrected, you might want to let the StopZilla team know about it. FYI.

---Ed Trice

Site has been scanned multiple times

I've just scanned the site using three different online scanning programs and they all said the site was clean.

Before I went to manual verification of users there were some spam accounts but they were deleted long ago. The spam accounts are automatically blocked and deleted. If there's a specific URL StopZilla is complaining about you can email me about it.

To contact the admin of this site send emails to: cubexyz at gmail dot com

Re: Site has been scanned multiple times

Just to be clear to anyone reading this: I never had a problem after visiting here, I was just reporting what StopZilla "advised."

I also just emailed you a screen shot of what I see. I hope this is of some help.

---Ed Trice