Crap!  We blew up our database! ~

GrogHeads Newsdesk, 13 July 2018

Apparently the Russian hacker disapproved of the latest episode of Dragon Up The Past and they took down our forum database.  Either that, or our YUUUUUUGE fanbase has posted so many messages that we blew up the server.  Go with whichever one makes you feel better 🙂

Meanwhile, you can always just use the comment area below this post to continue to discuss and/or commiserate.

Or hit our Facebook page.

Or our Twitter feed.

Or you could, y’know… go play a game!

UPDATE 2245 EDT 7/13

We got an alert from GoDaddy at approximately 1645 today that the database for our forums exceeded the size limit for our hosting plan.  About 60% of that limit is the table in that holds all of your posting history, so it’s not a lot of fluff.

Of course we get this alert 15 minutes before the curtain comes down on the work week on the East Coast, and as everyone is already bailing out of work with visions of beer & wargames dancing in their heads.

Now, when this happened, we were only about 5% over the DB limit and well within the capabilities of SMF’s own internal maintenance tools of paring the error logs, backup files, etc. to bring us within compliance.  But we’d had our write-access completely shut off, which meant no one was able to log in at all (because each login writes a login event).  So not was our admin team locked out, but the database continued to balloon as you – our loyal fans – kept trying to log in and get errors when SMF was telling you that you were locked out (each failed login writes an error).

We shot up almost 1/2 GB in 3 hours thanks to all y’all GrogHeads-addicted forum geeks.

But we still couldn’t get into our forum to do anything.

Our next plan was to create and download a backup of the DB, and then attempt to manually edit the SQL tables using GoDaddy’s built-in web access.  Of course, that was right when the server threw an Apache error, and what was normally a 10 minute process dragged on to 80 minutes before GoDaddy shut it down and restarted it.

We manually edited the database, and go down from 155% of our capacity limit to 40% of that limit, but we still couldn’t get in, because even though we got below the size limit, we’re still hitting the threshold on rows within the database.

Worse, GoDaddy wouldn’t even allow access to the DB for our team to even try to run the built-in SMF maintenance tools.  After 85 minutes on the phone, we finally found someone who would let us get into the system and run those SMF maintenance tasks.

At this point, we’re online, but honestly not sure for how long.

And we’re still on GoDaddy right now, but honestly not sure for how long.

Chat about it below, or in our forums, or hit our FaceBook page >>