First and foremost, sorry.
The plan was to do some maintenance and improvements and then bring the site back online. As you can guess, it failed. I'll explain what happened in laymans terms. Basically what happened was we wanted to update apache, apache runs the http service and we wanted to update the version of php that we run to the most up to date version.
When running the apache update, an error message appeared quite quickly indicating that we had exceeded disk quota and it failed, it's supposed to revert back to the most recent working configuration but failed to restart, Upon investigation it was evident that the "inodes" had maxed out causing the disk quota warning. So what are inodes, in laymans terms, anytime you had a file to server, it uses one inode. We have 1,000,000 (1 million) available inodes and every single one of them had been used.
Until we could free those inodes we couldn't attempt the apache restart again (would have just failed). Well it failed anyway, a problem with syntax within a file called httpd.conf - only no syntax error existed. We also then had further errors with modules not being found as part of the update to apache and it failing and also caused the http service to fail on restart.
Bottom line is, we had to go to the host and raise a ticket for investigation. This was resolved about 2 hours ago, however, we have remained offline to do some further checks & final preparation work. So what was the maintenance?
To update apache to the most recent version
To update php to the most recent version
To bring the asylum back
To get the streams system working correctly
UoTM archive completed (some users who where missing may receive a notifcation that they received UoTM for June, please ignore).
Review and reduce disk usage
I'm pleased to say, that all of these are now working and yes, the asylum is back "sort of". When I say "sort of" it is back in all it's glory, the only problem that exists and any topics or posts will show guest before the username, why? This is quite simple really, I don't want to import the members from the vBulletin forum as it will duplicate them and causes a lot more work. So what we will do is slowly manually changes the topic starters and posters to the member ID that we all have.
The streams service will correctly update and show streams online, how many are viewing etc and you can see this in the live streams sidebar or from the main link.
Again, we are sorry for this but on the bright side, we have been able to resolve a few outstanding issues and we have been able to reduce our overall disk usage even further.
Thanks
Craig
P.S. I've updated the donation amount for this month as we had a package change to give us more disk quota, we are good to reduce it back but this month we'll keep the package on the upgraded one for the time being.