Forum OpenACS Q&A: OpenACS.org is back

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1: OpenACS.org is back
Posted by Ben Adida on 08/08/01 02:39 AM
OpenACS.org is back at http://208.184.248.88. Woohoo!! Thank you
ArsDigita for the help in getting the data to us ASAP. Thanks
especially to Anthony Coughlan.

Soon, the DNS will spread. We might have a few issues left with email,
but those will be fixed with DNS spreading, too.

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2: Response to OpenACS.org is back (response to 1)
Posted by Mat Kovach on 08/08/01 06:36 AM
I'd like to give a big thanks to everybody who worked to get things back up as quickly as possible, despite the unexpected cause of the problem.
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3: Response to OpenACS.org is back (response to 1)
Posted by Jun Yamog on 08/08/01 02:02 PM
Hi Ben,

I am trying to get the nightly tar balls again from /4/.  There seems
to be a problem with it.

Also tried to do a cvs checkout openacs-4.  Even tried to use the IP
address as the pserver.  No go.  Anyway will CVS or nightly tar balls
will be available soon?

Jun

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4: Response to OpenACS.org is back (response to 1)
Posted by MaineBob OConnor on 08/08/01 02:30 PM

I missed you and I'm thrilled that OpenACS is back... Thank you to all involved. The biggest missing for me was the forums. They contain valuable hints that I can search for or just ask questions and get THE ANSWER from this great community! Yes! So, for me, the biggest and most valuable $$$ asset are the forums.

It may be instructive to learn about the backup strategy used and recommended strategies going forward....

Someone could have a backup machine that has the whole site... a day late based on the *daily* backup. Of course, this event only occurs once in a "blue moon" so... how much insurance is reasonable?

Maybe the new hosting provider is solid now, but what about a hard drive failure, and other acts of god!

-Bob

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5: Response to OpenACS.org is back (response to 1)
Posted by Ben Adida on 08/08/01 04:29 PM
The nightly backups will return within 24 hours. The CVS server
will be up by Friday at the latest. It's a bit more difficult to move
over CVS with all of its users than it is to move over a neat little
PG dump file :) Sorry for the delay on that.

As for our general strategy for backups and such. The new
OpenACS box runs hardware RAID 1 (straight mirroring) on
hot-swappable drives, and has redundant power supplies. Thus,
we are safe from the most common type of failure.

We are preparing a backup plan much like the one described
above, where mirrors would exist on the OpenACS site. We'll
start with mirrors of the OpenACS downloads. Later on, what
we'd really like to do is use the PostgreSQL replication options to
do complete mirroring. Probably the asynchronous one-way
replication to start, given that we don't want network issues to get
in the way of database commits. So a plan is in the works. We'll
get that information out to everyone ASAP.

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6: Response to OpenACS.org is back (response to 1)
Posted by Ben Adida on 08/08/01 04:29 PM
Sorry, that first line should read the "nightly tarballs" not the
nightly backups!