Hosting package upgrade - Part II (complete)

[Lazy Bastard]

We're implementing a more robust backup and restore suite for GameHacking.org and its hosted sites, which will allow any individual site to restore from either daily, weekly, or monthly backups, independent of one another, and without intervention from GameHacking.org staff, let alone hosting service provider staff. However, this will require a DNS change (due to a zone change), which may result in a small period of downtime. To minimize the effect of this downtime, DNS TTL is being minimized, and the cut-over is being performed at 1AM CST, February 20th.

Immediately before the cut-over, all data will be re-synced with the cloned VPS, to avoid any new posts/edits being lost. However, to eliminate any minute possibility of losing a thread posted just before the cut-over, it is advised not to engage in any such activity after midnight, February 20th (end of February 19th, in other words).

Hopefully, this change will be imperceptible. If not, we will address any issues as soon as possible.

[Lazy Bastard]

This change is complete.

There was a minor issue concerning DNS changes; our host was intent on verifying the final data sync before migration to the new VPS (we'd already done this earlier and I'd requested no confirmation after the next incremental sync and cut-over, but apparently this is against their policy, for liability reasons). Unfortunately, since I'd scheduled the change to occur at 1AM and our host was waiting for my confirmation of successful final sync, the change did not occur until 7AM when I awoke to discover it had not been made.

Two of our hosted sites had already performed DNS changes on their ends, as they were the only two using non-GameHacking.org DNS servers, and I'd informed them to perform these changes shortly before 1AM. This meant that these two had been operating on the new VPS since about 1AM, but that all other sites had been operating on the existing VPS. If I allowed the host to perform another final sync, all new data on these two sites (forum posts, site updates, etc) would be lost, and they would be restored to their state prior to the DNS change on their end...and since there was more activity on these two sites during this time period than on the others, I made the decision to perform the cut-over without an additional data sync.

The end result of this is that all forum posts and site updates made between approximately 1AM and 7AM CST today (February 20) have been erased. I see a handful of posts on GameHacking.org to which this has occurred (a couple of Hacking Scene News items, a single code post, and a request for help with a code); I'll manually copy the content of these posts over.

Apologies for any annoyance this caused.

[rimsky82]

It's all good. It could have been worse.

Not to mention how bad things could have been if something were to happen in the future without our new backup system.