Monday, May 20, 2013

Trac migration and forum crash details

Trac/SVN

You probably didn't notice but I had been working a lot on the servers and I recently migrated our old trac server to a new server.

However, a migration never goes without a glitch (who unleashed Murphy?). A few settings changes needs to be done for Trac and we're done but SVN was behaving. The only solution I saw is moving it temporarily to a separate server/URL: http://svn.aircrack-ng.org
You can also reach it via https but it's a self signed certificate for now.
Since the repository UUID didn't change, you can simply relocate your local copy or check out with the new svn URL.

Trac URL didn't change and it is now also available via HTTPS with a proper certificate

Forum

It had a big issue a few weeks ago. My provider told me their log says the instance was stopped. However, their cloud system crashed the instance.

The non-persistant disk where the OS of the instance is installed goes back to its original state (so any data/customization on that disk is lost) when the VM is stopped or archived. I already had similar issues before but I was able to force the instance to reboot so it wasn't a big deal.

Forum data is hosted on a MySQL database and those files were on the non-persistant disk.

Good news: Forum files and Apache config were stored on the persistant disk and I had a backup script for the DB.
Bad news: last time the backup script ran was in July 2012.
Lesson learned: check every often that the backup scripts are still running.

We lost about 10 month of posts and I am deeply sorry for what happened. I had a discussion with my provider and I'm now downsizing due to that issue, past issues and their customer support. I'll only keep stuff that never gave me any issue: domains.
Trac was the first service to be migrated to the new server a very good friend gave me (I can't thank him enough for that). Other services will be moved on that server too.

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