The Viper Files Blog

So right now I’ve got the server up and running with cPanel on it. The problem is, there’s not much I can do.

Yes, I have backups from last week, but I REALLY need the latest backups from our old datacenter, and those f*ckers haven’t replied to me in several days. Tomorrow I’m going to be calling them during my lunch break at work or something. Beg to them to let me access the files…

Anyways, I’m down to $260 in my personal bank account, seeing as how I had to spend over $400 of my personal savings to pay for the server’s cPanel license. Also, I have to go buy new pants tomorrow between my classes, since all of my jeans (all four of them) have holes in the crotch.

Anywho, here’s my to-do list for the next couple of days:
-Beg from Burst (our old datacenter)
-Get backups
-Restore TVF
-Restore TVF SQL Database
-Restore all other sites
-Restore email accounts on server
-Tweak /etc/my.cnf file for new server.
-Tweak /etc/csf/csf.*
-Sleep
-Eat
-Get paid
-Work 40+ hours/week
-Get paid just above minimum wage
-Be abused by customers
-Be abused by PMS’ing (no offense to women) bosses
-Get oil change
-Buy pants
-Buy work shirts
-Email current datacenter and see about getting a 4th IP address
-Make girlfriend happy
-Get ACE to read this and Twitter before asking me stupid questions
-42.

You can now follow us on Twitter!
http://twitter.com/drmacinyasha
http://twitter.com/viper3773
http://twitter.com/theviperfiles
(continue reading…)

Alright, so after emailing back and forth with our datacenter, they’ve narrowed down our downtime to two main causes:

1) The CPU was overheating. Yup, even after three new hardware sets, the CPU kept overheating, and now there’s a new heatsink and cooling fan on it.

2) We were running out of swap space. My guess? MySQL was over-doing it. So now I have to figure out how to optimize the server’s memory usage and possibly get more RAM for it. Owwies!

Aaaand I’m going to be yelling at ACE to fix the Ads on here and I’m probably going to have to change the ads on the forum back to AdBrite since AdSense isn’t working right.

Alright, so we have a couple of changes in our staff!

• ACE and Mr Happy are now our two new Super Moderators, meaning they have quite a few admin powers and can help out a lot more with things like banning malware/phishing posters, keeping the forum up, etc.
• Joephus and Rich'd 1337 have both unfortunately been demoted. Let's thank them both for their months of appreciated hard work being moderators on TVF!
• We're looking for new Moderators. This doesn't mean you should PM or beg anyone to be a moderator. Just be an active, friendly member of the community, help with Requests and Help Desk submissions, etc. and we'll notice you, don't worry! Though if you do go and beg to be a staff member, odds are you just blew any chance you had of becoming a moderator. I can't stress this enough!

On a side note, we've been having issues with PayPal lately (they didn't like our old XXX section and have been limiting our accounts, and I'm trying to fight them off) so if you'd like to donate and sign up for VIP status, send me a PM and I'll let you know what options we have right now. Hopefully we'll get PayPal straightened out or find a very nice work-around of some sort, more details soon!

Well as you can see the site is down. To be honest I’m not sure why but I’m sent a message to Dr Mac’s phone informing him of the problem so hopefully it will be sorted soon enough.

This is just to let you know we’re aware of the problem and working on it.

Sorry for the downtime folks.

I gave the server a reboot and we are back in busniess. Site might be running a little slow for a bit. Please bare with us. Hope we dont run in to any other problems for the rest of the night.

Enjoy the forum eveyone

Alright, so yes, the server is unreachable, but it’s not our fault, honest!

Our server’s remote reboot (really just a web interface for its APC UPS, or APC-brand Uninterrupted Power Supply, aka battery backup) IP, which is on a different subnet, I might add, is unresponsive, and our datacenter’s main website is unresponsive, too.

Fortunately, their support site isn’t down, so I’ve put in a ticket letting them know, and hopefully they’ll get things working soon.

Woohoo! 25 hours of uptime with virtually no problems! A few database errors here and there (nothing a few clicks in phpMyAdmin can’t fix) and had to tweak mod_security to be compatible with vBulletin, but other than that everything seems to be working OK!

Our backup scripts are working beautifully, and the only thing I don’t have running right now is the old firewall. Still holding off for a bit on that one. Also, once I get some issues with our bank and PayPal fixed, I’ll be talking with IPS (the manufacturer of our forum’s software) to try and figure out why the page-load times on the forum indexes (topic lists) are so long.

If you run into a Database error, PHP error, or really long load-times somewhere other than the forum indexes, please comment here and tell me exactly WHEN you got the error, and what page you were on, and I’ll look into it.

Everyone who I had to restore has been restored (ACE, you need to get in touch with me on MSN…)

Opening up the forums as soon as the server reboots!

OK, so I got mod_security and mod_evasive installed into Apache (after having to install over a dozen dependencies and configure the mod_security config files… Ugh).

Just a little more fine-tweaking, then I’ll start restoring users (ando, ace, viper377, myself, joephus, doylcean, gamerzfo, etc.)

Once that’s done, TVF will be open. Blah! *dance*