The "official" Stratics update thread

[Adam]

I'm going to post any news I receive on the state of Stratics' forums and sites which are currently down, if and when I get any.

These are the updates as I've received them and what's been posted on Stratics' main news pages.

Stratics Network News - May 8, 2008 4:54 PM EDT

On Friday, May 2, at approximately 7 a.m. EST due to events beyond our immediate control involving a third party data center, we suffered a catastrophic systems failure. This systems failure has affected the databases that supported our forums, EVE, WAR and as well affecting site data for L2.

We are working diligently around the clock to restore the data and databases to working order. Restoration includes data recovery and setup, a process that is very tedious and time consuming. At this time we unfortunately do not have a firm ETA on when this process will be complete.

We apologize to our dedicated community for this inconvenience and thank you all for your patience and your understanding during this down time. If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please contact the Directors of Stratics at directors (at) stratics (dot) com.

A further update as posted by Orvago here - http://www.uoforums.com/339764-post174.html

Read as follows
(Dated, 11th of May, 2008)

Howdy everyone!

Just wanted to drop by and let you all know that we are now able to and are working to get a set of TEMPORARY forums put in place until the recovery process is completed.

Please be aware, at this time we have no plans to merge any posting data that is posted on the TEMPORARY forums we will be getting up soon. However, we might try and keep such data if it seems like it would be well worth it. That part of the TEMPORARY forums is still up in the air.

As well, everyone will need to register on the TEMPORARY forums to post as the user database will be inaccessible on the TEMPORARY forums while it is being recovered.

Once the TEMPORARY forums are in place, one of us will come here and let you know!

However, progress is being made! The tech teams have been able to complete the recovery of the EVE-ONLINE (Eve Online - Your EVE ONLINE Community Resource) and WARHAMMER (http://war.stratics.com/) Web Sites (there's still an issue with WAR being accessible however, it should be up soon!)!


Once again, our deepest apologies for what has transpired and the lengthy time this is taking to get the forums and sites recovered. We do not expect to see a significant loss in user data. Some of the newest users might end up having to re-register, however. We'll keep you posted!

And a couple of clarifications

1) No they weren't hacked
2) There's no set ETA

[Adam]

Received an update from Gallahan.

Hi Adam,

I have a quick update for you regarding our downtime. As we've essentially been forced to pursue data recovery - which is a long process - we've set up temporary forums for our users. These can be at: UO Stratics Forums - Temporary Stratics Forums. Users will unfortunately need to create new accounts. We will do our best to migrate posts made here to the old boards when they come back, but can't make any guarantees (i.e. what you post here may be lost from history). There is an announcement on the boards that details the reason for the downtime and also why we chose VBB for the temporary forums.

If you could get this info out to your community, that would be awesome and much appreciated!

Thanks in advance.

--
Michael "Gallahan" Buckwald
Executive Director
Stratics

And a "What happened to Stratics?" post, as posted on their temporary forums

What happened to the forums?

It's important to note first off that we take lots of precautions to prevent the loss of data. Stratics is hosted on five production servers. The forums sit on a brand new machine with eight SAS drives operating in a RAID configuration. In the unlikely event that machine loses enough drives for there to be data loss, we contract for both local daily backups as well as local backups to remote datacenters in New York and the mid-west. That's an eight drive RAID configuration with brand new SAS drives and three daily backups. In this case, our primary data center accidentally wiped the data off the forums server while trying to install a new operating system on a similar looking machine. At the same time, we discovered that the system administration firm we contracted with at the time had not performed any recent backups in spite of correspondence with us to the contrary.

Thus we were forced to send the machine out for data recovery by a leading firm. Unfortunately, the process is very slow. Thus these temporary forums.