A crash course in what not to do as a programmer.

  1. 7 years ago

    So some of you may be wondering what happened to the server and then the forum today/yesterday.

    TLDR; Note to self, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. If you want to sleep, don't be a programmer.

    Our server's kernel was out of date, had some issues and then crashed forcing us to do a hard reboot. (Nothing was really lost though, our backups are much more frequent) This was a pretty quick fix, I just had to replace some of the corrupted files with ones from our backups.

    The forum was a bit of a bigger situation that took a bit more time and effort to fix. After the main server crashed, I figured it would be a good idea to update the forum's server as well (sounds like a reasonable idea). I expected a few minutes of downtime while we were updating due to restarts but I had no idea what was about to happen. After running the correct commands to update and waiting a bit, it asked me to restart the server. When it came back, I knew I had fucked up.

    The forum is built on PHP 5.6 and is not updated for php 7.0. Ubuntu 16.04 only has the repository for PHP 7.0, by using a PPA to get PHP 5.6 I was able to get the forum to run but not communicate with the database server. After getting the database server to work I realized that it was no longer on PHP 5.6 and was back on 7.0 (which broke the forum again). I decided the best way to fix all the issues was to go back to Ubuntu 14.04 (I know it works) however they don't make it easy to downgrade at all. I took a snapshot of the server as a restore point incase it all went tits up and then clicked on the reinstall button on OVH's control panel.

    I couldn't believe my eyes, it said that I had a snapshot and I had to delete it before I could reinstall, what good is a restore point if you can use it to restore????

    I spent bunch of quality time finding all the bits of data that I would need to save to setup the new OS. I deleted the snapshot, clicked the reinstall button and crossed my fingers. About 10 minutes later I got my email telling me that my new OS was ready, I setup the webserver, database server, ssl, keys and then proceeded to import all the data into the server. The forum content was easy, just copied the files over, however, when it came time to importing the data from the database, I was met with an unpleasant flood of errors. It turns out that after updating to Ubuntu it modified the database a bit (changed the engine type of the tables that store system data) I had to manually change each one that created an error one at a time because it would get to that line and the quit.

    The final curve ball was a bit of a surprise to me, when I was trying to fix the issue I turned on debug mode (shows more detail about errors including stuff like deprecation messages). That caused it to just insert all the error messages just anywhere in the forum making it unusable.

    It is now 6 in the morning and I have yet to go to sleep from the previous server crash and before that I was attempting to port forward through 2 routers, a modem and then reverse proxy through https, little did I know that both firewalls on the routers were blocking non http ports, the reverse proxy didn't support https and the webserver wasn't even running even though it said it was.

    I have school in about 3 hours so I'm going to get some sleep.

    Night Ya'll!

    - Crafty

  2. Thanks Crafty for your non stop commitment to the server!

  3. Team eye thanks you

  4. Wow, such hard work, I even felt the struggle while reading it, thank you!

  5. Why are you guys followers of the yellow one? Be followers of Crafty!
    Crafty deserves so much credit for all that he does for the server!

  6. Yay Crafty saves the day once again :D

    (That was a lot of work! D:)

  7. @CraftyMyner I couldn't believe my eyes, it said that I had a snapshot and I had to delete it before I could reinstall, what good is a restore point if you can use it to restore????

    I know Crafty was probably half-asleep when he wrote this but damn I laughed

  8. We love you Crafty ^_^

  9. That sounds like quite the nightmare. But since we're all here, you must've gotten it fixed or restored! /cheer

    What was the PPA you used when you tried the update? Ondrej?

  10. @Valgys What was the PPA you used when you tried the update? Ondrej?

    Yeah, that was the one that was mentioned most places online, I figured I would just give up on updating and go back to 14.04, it was like 5 in the morning and I just wanted it to work so I could go to bed.

  11. im happy that stuff didnt happen when i updated my laptop to windows 10 on day 1

  12. @ardoasms im happy that stuff didnt happen when i updated my laptop to windows 10 on day 1

    Hopefully what happened to my Minecraft screen when I updated to Windows 10 doesn't happen to you...

  13. @ardoasms im happy that stuff didnt happen when i updated my laptop to windows 10 on day 1

    I pulled my gaming PC out of my closet one day to see if it still worked, to my surprise it did! about 2 hours later it auto updated to windows 10 and then everything was broken, I lost my SLI, all my display setups, and half my programs didn't work.

  14. @CraftyMyner I pulled my gaming PC out of my closet one day to see if it still worked, to my surprise it did! about 2 hours later it auto updated to windows 10 and then everything was broken, I lost my SLI, all my display setups, and half my programs didn't work.

    rest in pieces that pc

  15. @CraftyMyner it auto updated to windows 10 and then everything was broken, I lost my SLI, all my display setups, and half my programs didn't work.

    LOL

  16. Yes Crafty I have experienced the tragedies of Windows 10 too so I stayed with Windows 7 :>

  17. *snap
    ahh Im so sorry for my lapse, I am no longer possessed by the yellow one. sorry for the inonvienience. I believe in the animals religion now, bees, sharks, ravens, bears and penuins etc...

  18. I'm updating to windows 10 enterprise too.
    If you are willing to work with it and disable telemetry it can be quite useful. 7 is going to start showing its age soon.

  19. [deleted]

    8 Sep 2016
    Deleted 3 years ago by CraftyMyner
  20. Deleted 7 years ago by GibsonAxe

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