As most of you have noticed we were down most of saturday. The database server crashed and wiped out two databases. Guess which two were wiped out? The Main Game database and the Forum database had many tables deleted.

We were able to save the user tables from the forum. The only backup for the forums we had is from June of last year. So the forums are back up without losing a single user but the data is 10 months old.

The main game had to be reset because the only backup we had was from the same time, June of last year. If the player table had survived we could have updated all player profiles with the games data but it was one of the tables that died.

The only backup system we had running was a daily backup for the profiles and that database wasn't touched.

We are sorry for the inconvenience and yes we are more than a little ticked off as the new WebMin we installed has built in Mysql daily backups. If that would have been enabled we would have only lost a day of data. We have enabled backups on the database server so this shouldn't be an issue anymore.

Again, we are sorry for the inconvenience.

PJ, it has been a day and a half of problems.
I have moved things over to the new server, and I am waiting to see what the captains will decide to do.
The Draft Tornament has 4 options,
continue from the new server from where we left off;
Reset and start again with players and teams at the end of the week as long as I can reset Players and Teams;
Reset from scratch;
Or forget it all together;

Captains, it is your call.

http://www.websnz.net/aatradeT is where it will be.

Being a popular free game can be expensive. I have footed the bandwidth cost out of my own pocket from the beginning, and PJ has supplied both servers we use. My time gets pulled from being a sysadmin to being a full time web programmer. PJ's time has been spent working on the new version. Being a jack of all trades sometimes things fall through the cracks and unfortunately this was one of those things. I lost 3 diffrent server databases with the move. No ryhme or reason for any of them. One was a client server which I managed to recover the data after 8 hours of work, another was a client adserver which was totally trashed. This one was one of the most bizzare crashs I have seen. Never have I seen a DB get waxed like I saw this time around.

We have suffered the ill effects of Murphys law, and as it happens, bad things always happens in 3's And the game server happened to be the third. I plan on ramping the main game up a bit so game play will run fairly fast. PJ is still frantically working towards the release of .30. Daily db backups have been abled and I plan on adding it to my remote backup routines. So hopefully the next bad thing we will be more prepared this time.

Thanks for the great community support, sometimes there are dark days, this is just one of them

I just made my $5.00 monthly donation to the game. It is this kind of occurance that will make a labor of love, a tedious task for free game developers. I know that waving my flag over a small amount like $5.00 is odd, but I believe a little bit of direct advertising is just what a donation based game needs. I play ATT more than I watch my cable TV with my silly TIVO attached and that cost me at the very least $40.00 a month.

I will take the responsability for this one.

We have backup routines built into the game and the forums. We disabled them because of a performance issue related to the size of the main game months ago. Was it the right thing to do? At the time yes but using an alternative was something we kept putting off as other things were more important.

The game is a hobby for us, a hobby that has taken on a life of its own. One we definately enjoy. I should have made a backup of all the databases before we moved. I did backup the main server to cd but not the databases. I admit that I was in a hurry and forgot. It came back to bite us in the butt.

I upgraded the version of WebMin running on the game servers the day before we moved them and there is a fantastic filesystem backup utility included in the package. I should have enabled this but at the time things were a little harried.

We now have multiple daily backups being made to different locations. There is only one that puts a noticable load on the server and it happens at 9am GMT.

You have no idea how pissed off I have been the last 24 hours. I spent atleast 8 hours straight working on recovering the databases and getting everything back up and running again. And I still have more work to do in the forums as I have t0 recover a bunch of private/hidden data. We have learned our lesson.

In all actuality, its .21+ Has all the same stuff as .21 plus the patches.

Basically the game started with the exact same code as before. The setup file still says it is 0.20 so that is what ws put in the config table.

Man, I have to say I LOVE Google.

We lost all of the data for the About Profiles, Gallery, Store and Hall of Fame areas of the web site when the database crashed but Google came to the rescue.

Google had recently cached copies of all those pages. I was able to use those cached pages to rebuild all of those areas. I didn't want to try and remember all 18 of the About Profile entries.

Now if the Wayback Machine site comes back up I might even be able to get some of the forum threads back that we lost. I have my fingers crossed.