RMweb - Change of hosting, missing images - April 2022

[AY Mod]

19 hours ago, martin_wynne said:

As a matter of interest -- what happened to the corrupt drives from Dediserve?

 

Did they send them to a forensic data recovery service? It would be telephone-number expensive, but if they won't pay, how about some crowd funding on RMweb?

 

I feel sure if GCHQ needed the pictures they would get them.🙂

 

Martin.

 

I can't even begin to answer that without going into a purple apoplectic rage.

[C126]

1 hour ago, AY Mod said:

 

You'll be following old links - as with the Blog link in your signature.

 

Many thanks; I think I have solved it now...

[Tallpaul69]

17 hours ago, Ian J. said:

A good reason to hold on to past images:

 

What if someone new comes to the forum, sees a thread or blog article demonstrating a technique they are interested in knowing how to do, and the images that show so much of the information just aren't there...?

I would agree with this view if Andy & Co had said "sorry everyone, all your pics are lost for ever", but they haven't!

We just need to be patient and see how things are in say, a month's time?

Then set to to add back what appears to be lost.

The chance of someone getting all their pics back on forum quicker than the restore is going to work, is I suggest remote. If 20% of contributors do a picture repost, then there are still 80% that a newcomer could wanting to look at and not find the pics!

By all means, if you feel it is time well spent, add back the last year's pics, but even that is, I suggest, too much for most contributors?

Added to which, all this additional traffic might bring the system down again!

If you don't feel the urge, don't feel pressured by all those who are doing so, remember the evils of "panic buying"?

But if you feel the urge, don't let me stop you, just don't go on about it on the forum, or complain at how behind you are getting on your modelling projects.

At the end of the day, reach to their own!

Happy modelling (or picture uploading), or whatever makes you happy!

Cheers

Paul 

[Ian_M]

3 hours ago, martin_wynne said:

As a matter of interest -- what happened to the corrupt drives from Dediserve?

 

Did they send them to a forensic data recovery service? It would be telephone-number expensive, but if they won't pay, how about some crowd funding on RMweb?

 

I feel sure if GCHQ needed the pictures they would get them.🙂

 

Martin.

Without wishing to increase blood pressure anywhere, I was wondering if anything in the background is going on to get compensation from the old hosts. Keeping backups on the same drives as the original is pretty much gross negligence - I'd have thought a half decent laywer could make a case for loss of earnings from ads at least. Was there an SLA?

 

I know in my old IT job that sort of failure would be a 'major non conformity'

[NHY 581]

2 minutes ago, Ian_M said:

Without wishing to increase blood pressure anywhere, I was wondering if anything in the background is going on to get compensation from the old hosts. Keeping backups on the same drives as the original is pretty much gross negligence - I'd have thought a half decent laywer could make a case for loss of earnings from ads at least. Was there an SLA?

 

I know in my old IT job that sort of failure would be a 'major non conformity'

 

A noble thought but perhaps something which is not for public consumption and best left between Warners and Dediserve. 

 

Rob. 

[boxbrownie]

4 hours ago, PhilJ W said:

It might be your settings. I've set mine on 'Threads that I have posted on'. 

That’s what mine was on, I’ll check they haven’t gone with the new system…..thanks.

 

Nope not that, at the top of this thread it says “following” but still not getting email notifications.

Edited April 8, 2022 by boxbrownie

[Colin_McLeod]

4 hours ago, AY Mod said:

 

I can't even answer that without going into a purple apoplectic rage.

 

It's a certain Accurascale Deltic you need for retail therapy.

 

[Colin_McLeod]

7 hours ago, NHY 581 said:

 

 

Did this as a precautionary measure. Regretably lost one's quick links to Rubber and Plastic Weekly in the process but ho hum..........

 

https://interplasinsights.com/latest-issues

 

😉

[Rob McM]

Pleased to be back after being allowed to reset my password. Looking forward to joining in the topics.

 

RobMcM 

[Huw Griffiths]

5 hours ago, martin_wynne said:

As a matter of interest -- what happened to the corrupt drives from Dediserve?

 

Did they send them to a forensic data recovery service? It would be telephone-number expensive, but if they won't pay, how about some crowd funding on RMweb?

 

I feel sure if GCHQ needed the pictures they would get them.🙂

 

5 hours ago, AY Mod said:

I can't even answer that without going into a purple apoplectic rage.

 

Understandable.

 

My guess is that nobody here will actually find out.

 

In theory, a number of things could happen - but probably won't.

• They could make genuine efforts to recover the data they managed to lose - well they could. I'd prefer not to speculate about whether or not this ever happens.
• These drives could take a starring role in a ceremony, in which they get "dedicated" to certain individuals there. Although I suspect that some people might take a certain satisfaction in "kicking off" proceedings, I wouldn't want to be seen to encourage violence. Probably the less said about this potential option the better.
• If what I've recently read on this website is anything to go by, I could imagine these drives being leased together, "as is", to a new victim customer.

I suspect that a number of us could guess which of these potential options sounds most likely to happen. I also suspect that it might be better if people here were to exercise restraint when it comes to discussing issues like this.

 

 

8 hours ago, NHY 581 said:

Regretably lost one's quick links to Rubber and Plastic Weekly in the process but ho hum..........

 

Sounds painful.

 

8 hours ago, St Enodoc said:

They'll bounce back.

 

Seriously though, some trade publications have names that could easily lead to raised eyebrows. These publications might not be of interest to everyone (fair enough), but I'm sure that most links that have been lost could soon be replaced.

 

 

Meanwhile, a lot of photos should also be able to be replaced - probably not all (especially if they were posted by people who are no longer here). There are practical limits to what can be done - but Andy (plus other people, whose names I don't know) continues to "tear his hair out" and do a lot of hard work trying to recover / improve the situation.

 

 

[Andy Hayter]

6 hours ago, martin_wynne said:

As a matter of interest -- what happened to the corrupt drives from Dediserve?

 

Did they send them to a forensic data recovery service? It would be telephone-number expensive, but if they won't pay, how about some crowd funding on RMweb?

 

I feel sure if GCHQ needed the pictures they would get them.🙂

 

Martin.

 

Lest anyone thinks this was a serious idea.  The problem will be that the lost data is likely to belong to many organisations and not just RMWeb and some/most of those may not have data in the public domain.  Further, these other organisations may well not be aware that there has been a problem if their data was handled professionally and back ups or originals were held elsewhere.

[BWsTrains]

8 hours ago, martin_wynne said:

As a matter of interest -- what happened to the corrupt drives from Dediserve?

 

This is my solution for such items.

 

 

 

 

They make excellent and stylish drinks coasters.

 

Alternatively they could be strung up to deter marauding birds in the garden but might be a bit hard to drill?

Edited April 8, 2022 by BWsTrains

[boxbrownie]

Still not getting any email notifications of followed threads, I’ve checked my preferences in followed content and all seems OK there, logged out and in again but still no notifications.

[AY Mod]

3 minutes ago, boxbrownie said:

Still not getting any email notifications of followed threads, I’ve checked my preferences in followed content and all seems OK there, logged out and in again but still no notifications.

 

The system seems to be working as it should and I've had them incoming all through the last 24+ hours.

 

It could be email client spam filtering or the ISP blocking emails - they will come through from the email address rmweb@warnersgroup.co.uk or noreply@invisioncloudcommunity.com so it may be worth specifically allowing those if you can.

[boxbrownie]

6 minutes ago, AY Mod said:

 

The system seems to be working as it should and I've had them incoming all through the last 24+ hours.

 

It could be email client spam filtering or the ISP blocking emails - they will come through from the email address rmweb@warnersgroup.co.uk or noreply@invisioncloudcommunity.com so it may be worth specifically allowing those if you can.

Nothing in my Spam inbox unfortunately, I’ll see if I can make sense of the other bit you mention.

[ejstubbs]

On 05/04/2022 at 09:22, Miss Prism said:

I think it is possibly too early to conclude anything about the old urls. Many/most do result in 'Oops - Euston we have a problem', but others seem to be redirecting to the new form, i.e. without community/index.php?/ , so something is going on in the engine room. We'll need to await a sitrep from Mr Y.

 

I suspect it's more to do with what URLs Google has stored in its unbelievably large and complicated index, and how often its crawlers re-visit the site.  Sounds like that is happening slowly if some are now correct.  Other search engines might give different results - Bing, anyone?  Oops, no - that seems to have the same problem, but affecting different individual search result hits i.e. some Bing hits work where the same hit with Google fails, and vice versa.  (AFAIK DuckDuckGo uses the APIs for the "mainstream" search engines in the background - it certainly seems to trip up on the same search hits as Bing, based on a tiny sample.)

 

It might be that @AY Mod or one of his minions could somehow arrange a redirect that would automatically correct the outdated reference to the "/community" URLs (which might also address some of the other glitches that one or two folks have been reporting) but I suspect he has other things on his plate ATM, especially given that there is actually a minimal-effort manual workaround.  (Hmm, maybe a suitably skilled individual could craft a Firefox add-on that would automatically remove the offending string?  Not that I use Firefox myself, mind you.)

 

I know the site has its own search engine but TBH Google is still my go-to, if only because I can usually get to what I'm looking for by typing a single search string and scanning a shortish list of search hits (plus it quite often finds relevant hits on other sites as well, which can be handy).  RMWeb's own search engine is still my backup on days when my Google-fu is weak, though.

[JimC]

a .htaccess statement like 

Redirect 301 /community/ https://rmweb.co.uk/
might be worth trying. I've done similar things with .htaccess redirect, but not exactly the same.

Edited April 9, 2022 by JimC

[Dave John]

I have just had a search test with Duckduckgo. ( I don't use google) . 

 

I see that some links still include "community/index.php" which throw an error, whereas others have been corrected. The corrected ones seem to be those where the photos have been replaced manually or by the site itself. 

 

As has been suggested , I think it depends on how often the search engines look at the site. Might well sort itself out over time. 

 

 

 

 

[lofty.ian]

On 08/04/2022 at 14:35, AY Mod said:

 

You'll be following old links - as with the Blog link in your signature.

Sorry, but i have the same problem of having to log in twice after getting the 'Euston' error message the first attempt. I am sure sure which 'link' you mean.

I have deleted my bookmark and created a new one so I go the the correct site.  I have cleared my history, cookies and cache, but still get the problem.  I must be missing something but not sure what.

Many thanks for all your efforts

[tigerburnie]

Well I went into hospital for a week and on my return there it was ........gone, glad it's back

[Philou]

@AY Mod I, too, am having the same - 'oops Euston we have a problem' with an added 'you do not have permission to access this page' showing in the browser tab whilst the secondary log-in screen loads. I had cleared my cache and browsing history (on auto-clear when ending my browser session) and got rid of the old /community/ link ages ago - the new shortcut is definitely directing towards https://rmweb.co.uk/. It worked two days ago but back to the double logging-in. Snot an issue for me - I'll live ;). The error code, if it can be of use, is 2S119/1 .

 

Cheers,

 

Philip

[Barnaby]

Is there a suggested Best Practice for opening up our forum content now that we have a new server?

Any Best Practice should become a sticky in the opening post of this topic. 

 

Should we just wait until any photo repopulation has been completed, as informed by Admin.

Did both the server an the hard drives fail as my understanding of these is that for a server fail you should just un-plug the old and replace with a new one and activate it.

For hard drive fails it is possible to recover most of the data but at a ££cost, I'm assuming the drives still exist.

If I add some photos back in but do not delete the names of the old photos will it double up when the server begins to repopulate my topics again.

Presently I'm hanging fire completely as I did put back in the last page of photos and lost them again when a 2nd outage took place. They're back in again.

 

Going forward what assurances can be given of what steps have been taken to prevent loss of data again.

 

It would be nice to be kept informed and up to date with any progress, expected further delays etc.

 

Answers along these lines will help me to decide what effort I put back into my topics to rejuvenate them.

 

Best

Edited April 10, 2022 by Barnaby

[DLT]

On 08/04/2022 at 23:07, BWsTrains said:

Alternatively they could be strung up to deter marauding birds in the garden....

 

Err, do you mean the discs, or the Data Managers at Dediserve???

[Philou]

An update for @AY Mod: Andy I logged in just now using the upper R/H log-in and it worked. Just for information, in the browser tab it marked something on the lines of 'RMWeb accessing Login#1' and I was in. Anyway, whatever you did, it worked and thanks for the hard work you've put into getting the site up and running again.

 

Like many, I shall wait until things settle down and if needs be, I'll upload any missing pictures (some I can't do due a harddrive failure - so we'll be where we'll be at that moment).

 

Cheers,

 

Philip

[melmerby]

Tried on Raspian with DuckDuckGo and it went straight to the (correct) home page.