RMweb - Change of hosting, missing images - April 2022

[hayfield]

A big thanks to all involved in getting the site back up and running

[Neil P]

15 minutes ago, MarkSG said:

Offsite backups are fundamental to any BCP. It's a pity that Warners have had to learn this lesson the hard way.

(I should also point out that I'm not criticising AndyY here. Back in the days when Andy was running RMweb himself and paying for the hosting out of his own pocket, avoiding the additional cost of an offsite backup provider was a risk worth taking for the sake of keeping costs manageable, given that it was just a hobby and not a job. But when Warners took it on, and decided to monetise it further via subscriptions and increased advertising, then it became a commercial service and, as such, needs commercial standards of IT management. And that's a boardroom level responsibility, not that of the people doing the work at the sharp end).

I think you've summed up my thoughts on the matter far better than I managed to with my somewhat clumsy posts last night.

[2mmMark]

9 hours ago, Colin_McLeod said:

 

Result of a quick google:

 https://www.dediserve.com/

 

Actually I jest about contacting Dediserve because nothing is going to be recovered and as we have sadly seen elsewhere, people in positions of responsibility feel themselves to be fireproof. A simple handwringing is sufficient mea-culpa, it seems nowadays.

As I mentioned on the relevant Facebook page, this is a salutary lesson in the fragility of digital data.
 

[AY Mod]

1 minute ago, 2mmMark said:

A simple handwringing is sufficient mea-culpa, it seems nowadays.

 

It wasn't even that genuine in some quarters to be honest. Their support channel was useless and after a period of grace I headed for the Chief Exec of the parent company, iomart, where there was an Account Manager who got the whole situation and understood, after looking at the evidence, why I was so racked off with Dediserve. This did kick some communications into life but their senior Customer Services manager breezed in with his superhero pants on to say how he would personally look after me if any further issues arose and he was only a personal email away blah, blah. His enthusiasm was dampened when I pointed out I'd got no faith in his new-found prowess as it had taken him 5 months to reply to an email regarding support levels last year.

 

Yes, we should have dumped them sooner.

[MrWolf]

1 minute ago, 2mmMark said:

 

Actually I jest about contacting Dediserve because nothing is going to be recovered and as we have sadly seen elsewhere, people in positions of responsibility feel themselves to be fireproof. A simple handwringing is sufficient mea-culpa, it seems nowadays.

As I mentioned on the relevant Facebook page, this is a salutary lesson in the fragility of digital data.
 

 

I think that we all have to accept that no matter what the digital gurus tell us, anything posted on the internet is ethereal and impermanent. 

It's in their interest to try to persuade us otherwise. All we can do is repair where we can and not get too wrapped up in what is already behind us.

 

I'll repeat what a good friend of mine says to me when my past is bringing me down:

 

"You're a motorcyclist, motorcycles don't have a reverse gear, you can only go forward."

[PhilJ W]

I know they will not have the capacity to hold something like RMweb but with my laptop I have an external hard drive. Very useful when I had a hardware failure.  

[JimC]

21 hours ago, MyRule1 said:

I must be lucky in that in about 35 years of managing large IT systems I never had to deal with a outage such as this,

Lucky indeed...

In the early days before organisation wide WAN links there was the burglary (server and all tapes) - "Oh, is that why you said we had to take a tape home every night? It seemed like too much trouble so we stopped doing it"

There was a week long recovery which I think involved disk controllers corrupting the disks. RAID 1 with two controllers, we *ought* to have been protected.  Never really got to the bottom of that, it looked like a disk problem at first, and even when I started considering the controllers it didn't really make sense. Had to put a complete new server in, and that costs time in procurement. Once the new box was in I lost interest in diagnosing precisely what the fault was! That was when I discovered just how **** poor the new enterprise back up library was over a WAN at DR restores from incrementals  which involved multiple tapes. Daily incrementals are fine for BAU restores but in those days at least were not great for DR.

That one was also complicated by the need to prioritise urgently needed data. The archive system was desperately inflexible, and while in theory I could have relocated the server to the DC for faster restores, in practice I also needed the server on site for a skeleton service. Hopefully the tools are better now. There used to be a saying in my NetWare days -  NW admins come in two flavours: those who have Backup Exec, hate it, and wish they had Arcserve, and those who have Arcserve, hate it, and wish they had backup exec.

[JimC]

8 minutes ago, AY Mod said:

Yes, we should have dumped them sooner.

However, as was said long ago, it still leaves you with the problem...

Edited April 1, 2022 by JimC

[JohnH]

Great to have RMweb back. Thanks to you Andy and all the others involved in restoring the forum.

[rab]

I note a lot of comments about lost photos and re-uploading them

 

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I thought I read a few pages back that it's only those from the last 12 months that are lost. Those previous to this are available on a back up and will be restored when time allows.

[Innerhome]

Big thanks to all involved in getting the Forum back up and running.  It's amazing how much you miss something once it's not there.

[john new]

Thanks for all you do.  
 

Have had IT issues over the years, although on much smaller scales, so fully understand the frustrations.

[Charlie586]

Thanks for all your hard work, Andy, in getting the site back up.

[MrWolf]

15 minutes ago, JimC said:

However, as was said long ago, it still leaves you with the problem...

 

Nicely done, I thought that everyone had forgotten about Bairnsfather's "Ole Bill".

[MarkSG]

10 minutes ago, JimC said:

Lucky indeed...

In the early days before organisation wide WAN links there was the burglary (server and all tapes) - "Oh, is that why you said we had to take a tape home every night? It seemed like too much trouble so we stopped doing it"

 

Back in the early 1990s, I worked in the IT department of a financial institution in the city of London. One of your tasks was doing the daily backup rotation. We would run the software which generated the backup tapes, then take them to the loading bay where a van would be waiting and we'd go through the process of swapping tapes over in their containers. We had to go through a checklist of which tapes were onsite and which were offsite according to a rotation log which ensured that there was always enough data in both locations to do a full recover if necessary. It was time-consuming, physical work (not ideal for your typical IT nerd!) and we all hated it.

 

One day, the van didn't turn up. We reported that to our management, who got on the phone to the offsite backup company and discovered that the van had been involved in an accident on the way to us. One of the directors then got his car from the company car park, brought it round to the loading bay and we had to load the tapes into the boot so that he could take them to the offsite facility. The necessity of having offsite backups was important enough for even one of the most senior members of staff to stop what he was doing and get involved in making it happen.

 

At another job, for a building society based in Norwich, we literally had to carry the backup tapes through the city centre to one of the company's branches where we had a fireproof cabinet for them. The shortest route there involved walking into one door of Woolworths, through the store and out of a different door facing a different street! 

 

I don't miss those days. The Internet has made offsite backups a whole lot easier 🙂 

[2mmMark]

21 minutes ago, MrWolf said:

"You're a motorcyclist, motorcycles don't have a reverse gear, you can only go forward."

 

Two of mine actually do have reverse

[AY Mod]

11 minutes ago, rab said:

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I thought I read a few pages back that it's only those from the last 12 months that are lost. Those previous to this are available on a back up and will be restored when time allows.

 

Unless there were any holes in the backup that we reinstated from as opposed to any which may still need to be indexed - I'll have a better handle on it in a few days.

[Neil P]

2 minutes ago, MarkSG said:

I don't miss those days. The Internet has made offsite backups a whole lot easier 🙂 

I worked for a company where we used to keep a backup onsite in the fire safe, plus offsite backups which staff took home with them. We used to call them "the hamsters", because it was like taking the school pet home to look after, knowing there would be trouble if you lost it.

[john new]

2 minutes ago, AY Mod said:

 

Unless there were any holes in the backup that we reinstated from as opposed to any which may still need to be indexed - I'll have a better handle on it in a few days.

If we are reinstating our own posted images - how far back should we go currently? I.e., Straight 12 months to 18 Mar 2021 or hold off for a bit with those on the cusp.

[AY Mod]

3 minutes ago, john new said:

how far back should we go currently? I.e., Straight 12 months to 18 Mar 2021 or hold off for a bit with those on the cusp.

 

It's certainly worth working backwards from 21st March 2022 for a year (as they weren't in the backup) and await developments on anything pre 2021.

[The Stationmaster]

Well done Andy and thanks for all your hardwork and commiserations for all the headaches Dediserve have caused you.  As I once said to an IT manager at work 'I've decided to start breeding swans as that will be far more reliable than using yoir useless system'.  I then had to explain to him where quill pens came from - he had no motre idea about that than he had about running an IT system.

 

Mike The (apparently anonymous) Stationmaster

[PhilJ W]

13 minutes ago, 2mmMark said:

 

Two of mine actually do have reverse

I just hope you never engage them by accident.😆 Seriously though I knew someone who had a Sunbeam motorcycle combination that had a reverse gear but thats for another thread.

Edited April 1, 2022 by PhilJ W
Fat finger syndrome

[PenrithBeacon]

1 minute ago, The Stationmaster said:

Well done Andy and thanks for all your hardwork and commiserations for all the headaches Dediserve have caused you.  As I once said to an IT manager at work 'I've decided to start breeding swans as that will be far more reliable than using yoir useless system'.  I then had to explain to him where quill pens came from - he had no motre idea about that than he had about running an IT system.

 

Mike The (apparently anonymous) Stationmaster

Well there's a backhanded compliment if ever there was one!

I spent most of my working career in IT (and well before the term came into use) and I've never understood why the fashion for outsourcing the service came about. IT, it seems to me, is so fundamental to any modern company that it must, absolutely must, be kept in house. It's not so difficult to manage a system, any college graduate with an appropriate degree can do it.

[MrWolf]

17 minutes ago, 2mmMark said:

 

Two of mine actually do have reverse

 

That's perfectly acceptable if they are also fitted with a sidecar and a machine gun.

[MarkSG]

3 minutes ago, PenrithBeacon said:

Well there's a backhanded compliment if ever there was one!

I spent most of my working career in IT (and well before the term came into use) and I've never understood why the fashion for outsourcing the service came about. IT, it seems to me, is so fundamental to any modern company that it must, absolutely must, be kept in house.

 

There are some things that pretty much have to be outsourced when it comes to public-facing IT, such as web hosting. Only the very largest of organisations have the resources to own their own data centre and run their own web servers in it. And even then, it's rarely cost-effective. 

 

3 minutes ago, PenrithBeacon said:

It's not so difficult to manage a system, any college graduate with an appropriate degree can do it.

 

Having seen the quality of many college graduates with IT degrees, I would respectfully disagree. The most important qualification for managing an IT system is plenty of experience.