Post by safari on Oct 17, 2012 20:21:15 GMT -6
Hi all,
I have just checked the Forumer support board and there has been a new update posted there today. Unfortunately, it appears that we will not be returning to Forumer, and that we have lost everything from our board. I am glad some of you have made it over here, however I suspect we will have lost a few members, especially the recently returned ones, who may not have bookmarked this backup board. A sad day indeed. Here is Forumer's update (if you can make sense of it):
Back on April 6, 2011, we purchased the Forumer platform with plans to improve and grow the community as part of the CrowdGather family. However, shortly after the acquisition we discovered the Forumer code base was unstable and that the server infrastructure supporting the software was overly complicated as well as situated on aging, unsteady servers.
Since maintaining the status quo was untenable, our first move was to work toward stabilizing the platform’s infrastructure by migrating Forumer to the cloud with Amazon’s Web Services (AWS). While the move to new hardware helped stabilize site uptime, it did not alleviate the challenges of Forumer’s software code base, nor was it possible to easily change the infrastructure configuration. Forumer’s current infrastructure makes it extremely difficult to deploy broad code base changes that apply consistently to all of Forumer. Additionally, the infrastructure makes it onerous and difficult to run data backups.
Instead of rewriting the Forumer code base and radically changing the infrastructure, which would have required an inordinate amount of resources, we made the decision to begin migrating Forumer to Yuku.com, a more stable and modern platform. Once completed, the migrations would obviate the need for significant code and server changes to Forumer. We announced the first of these migrations for IPB, since we felt that the IPB code base was most in need of improvement. To date, we have already migrated over 6,000 IPB boards to Yuku and soon we are going to migrate the phpbb2 boards, followed by phpbb3.
Unfortunately, and well before we were able to migrate any phpbb2 sites, we received a notice (copied below) from AWS indicating that the data on Forumer servers 14, 16 and 19 were irretrievably lost. Although measures were apparently in place to back up the data, it appears that none of the backup measures executed properly when the AWS hardware crashed. We felt Amazon’s response was unacceptable and pressed them to recover the data, but to no avail. We explored other possibilities and options, even seeking older copies of the data, but we were still unable to recover any data.
We are terribly sorry for the data loss many of you have incurred. Although we make every effort to back up data, it appears the worst has happened and contingency plans did not properly execute. We are continuing to migrate the rest of Forumer safely to Yuku, and are in the process of manually backing up every single Forumer server to protect the community against any other outages with Amazon.
Sincerely,
CrowdGather
From: "ebs-support@amazon.com" <ebs-support@amazon.com>
To: CrowdGather NOC AWS
Subject: Your EBS volume in us-east-1b
Dear CrowdGather ,
Your volume experienced a failure due to multiple failures of the underlying hardware components and we were unable to recover it.
Although EBS volumes are designed for reliability, backed by multiple physical drives, we are still exposed to durability risks caused by concurrent hardware failures of multiple components, before our systems are able to restore the redundancy. We publish our durability expectations on the EBS detail page here (http://aws.amazon.com/ebs).
Sincerely,
EBS Support
I have just checked the Forumer support board and there has been a new update posted there today. Unfortunately, it appears that we will not be returning to Forumer, and that we have lost everything from our board. I am glad some of you have made it over here, however I suspect we will have lost a few members, especially the recently returned ones, who may not have bookmarked this backup board. A sad day indeed. Here is Forumer's update (if you can make sense of it):
Back on April 6, 2011, we purchased the Forumer platform with plans to improve and grow the community as part of the CrowdGather family. However, shortly after the acquisition we discovered the Forumer code base was unstable and that the server infrastructure supporting the software was overly complicated as well as situated on aging, unsteady servers.
Since maintaining the status quo was untenable, our first move was to work toward stabilizing the platform’s infrastructure by migrating Forumer to the cloud with Amazon’s Web Services (AWS). While the move to new hardware helped stabilize site uptime, it did not alleviate the challenges of Forumer’s software code base, nor was it possible to easily change the infrastructure configuration. Forumer’s current infrastructure makes it extremely difficult to deploy broad code base changes that apply consistently to all of Forumer. Additionally, the infrastructure makes it onerous and difficult to run data backups.
Instead of rewriting the Forumer code base and radically changing the infrastructure, which would have required an inordinate amount of resources, we made the decision to begin migrating Forumer to Yuku.com, a more stable and modern platform. Once completed, the migrations would obviate the need for significant code and server changes to Forumer. We announced the first of these migrations for IPB, since we felt that the IPB code base was most in need of improvement. To date, we have already migrated over 6,000 IPB boards to Yuku and soon we are going to migrate the phpbb2 boards, followed by phpbb3.
Unfortunately, and well before we were able to migrate any phpbb2 sites, we received a notice (copied below) from AWS indicating that the data on Forumer servers 14, 16 and 19 were irretrievably lost. Although measures were apparently in place to back up the data, it appears that none of the backup measures executed properly when the AWS hardware crashed. We felt Amazon’s response was unacceptable and pressed them to recover the data, but to no avail. We explored other possibilities and options, even seeking older copies of the data, but we were still unable to recover any data.
We are terribly sorry for the data loss many of you have incurred. Although we make every effort to back up data, it appears the worst has happened and contingency plans did not properly execute. We are continuing to migrate the rest of Forumer safely to Yuku, and are in the process of manually backing up every single Forumer server to protect the community against any other outages with Amazon.
Sincerely,
CrowdGather
From: "ebs-support@amazon.com" <ebs-support@amazon.com>
To: CrowdGather NOC AWS
Subject: Your EBS volume in us-east-1b
Dear CrowdGather ,
Your volume experienced a failure due to multiple failures of the underlying hardware components and we were unable to recover it.
Although EBS volumes are designed for reliability, backed by multiple physical drives, we are still exposed to durability risks caused by concurrent hardware failures of multiple components, before our systems are able to restore the redundancy. We publish our durability expectations on the EBS detail page here (http://aws.amazon.com/ebs).
Sincerely,
EBS Support