StarTrekVoyager.Com Forums is Back Online!

[Morphy]

The following is an email I sent out last wednesday explaining what was happening with the server up to that point.

Quote:

July 10th, 2002 Dear StarTrekVoyager.Com Forum Members, THE BAD NEWS: StarTrekVoyager.Com Forums have been down for over two weeks :O. This was sudden, and totally unexpected. The ISP which I used to host the forums, all of the sudden blocked me from doing it. After I realized what had happened, I immediately tried to find a hosting solution which was both economical and a familiar to me. After the first week of downtime, my friend offered to host the site for very little cost. This is an economical solution I wanted, so I decided to take him up on his offer. The only problem is that I have drive 3-4 hours to drop off a server computer with him AND try to catch him on a day that he's free. After a lot of phone tag, I was scheduled to take that 3-4 drive and meet him in Kansas City Wednesday July 10th and put the site back up. I had time, and took the opportunity to upgrade the server computer. I ordered parts and was on schedule to get the site back up July 10th. However, yesterday while upgrading the server, I ran into a problem and the server's motherboard bios got totally messed up. This was due to a faulty floppy disk drive that was used to copy an updated motherboard BIOS to a disk. I didn't get any errors while copying to disk, and there was no way for me to know that the new BIOS got corrupted. I proceeded, and flashed the BIOS with the corrupted BIOS file, and the result was a dead motherboard. BIOS flashing is very risky. It can turn a good day into a really BAD one . I wish I could have just ignored it, but I had to update the BIOS to recognize the new faster CPU I put in there. I had no working server and only a day to find a solution. I can't order a new motherboard cause it would take 4-5 days to get it shipped to me. I thought about using my personal computer as a replacement until I could get a new motherboard ordered, but that would require me to take another day from my schedule to drive up to Kansas City. I was basically in a serious jam. NOW FOR SOME GOOD NEWS: I told a friend in town of my problems, and he offered to give me one of his motherboards for my server. This allows me to put together a working server today, and just order him another motherboard later. I also rescheduled the Kansas City meeting for Thursday. If nothing else goes wrong, the forums will be back up tomorrow afternoon, Thrusday July 11th. If for some reason this all falls apart (Murphy's Law) and I can't use my own server, then I will find an *immediate* solution with web hosting site. Regardless if this Kansas City thing works out, StarTrekVoyager.Com Forums will be back by this Sunday. I apologize, and deeply regret that this site that we all use and love has been down this long. I'm doing everything I can to get it back up. Once it's back up, it will be on a FASTER server, and hopefully everything will turn back to normal. Regards, Morphy www.startrekvoyager.com [email protected]

Since I wrote this letter, the server was successully put back online. There was a slight problem initially with posting, and the pages not refreshing. This was due to the latest version of PHP being incompatible with the latest version of Apache web server. Once I realized that ppl were having problems, I quickly reverted to an older version of Apache. This seems to have fixed the problem.

I apologize for not explaining all of this Thursday. I was out of town with no access to the forums, and when I got home, I had no personal computer to check the forums -- I had to rebuild my personal computer. Everything is back to normal now ... I hope heh:)


Morphy