Copasetic
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- Messages
- 36
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- 26
- Location
- Navarre Beach, Florida
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Hi All,
I'm sure a lot of you remember the old forum and like myself, miss the data that was contained within it.
Long story short, the old forum had a few problems once a lot of people were refreshing to see the latest posts if there was ever a hint of a snow event in the SE. It was hosted in a shared environment and just didn't have the resources.
There was not much in regard to sponsorship and around the 2008 timeframe I was hosting upwards of 5000 clients in various markets all on dedicated servers out of Chicago and Phoenix. I enjoyed the forum and told Jack I would handle the hardware and bandwidth.. It was neat seeing it handle a lot of people during the Feb 2014 snow event. Pretty sure that was it's standing record.
In 2015 I was relocated for work to Columbus, OH and in early 2016 I sold that hosting business but kept the old forum running on a pair of servers in Phoenix. The SAN that was handling the storage had a failure and IIRC, I was about to fly to Mexico or Canada the next morning so I paid for the datacenter staff to go hands on and swap drives. In the end, the hands on techs brought the SAN out of the fault but in the process of rebuilding the array, deleted upwards of 130TB worth of data. They admitted later that they were unsure of a step and picked the first option which was anything but rebuild but did not call me to confirm. Basically, it was wiped and new empty LUN's were presented to the servers.
Sadly, that SAN also held the backups for the forum and a few other sites. I should have just waited to land wherever and handled it myself but work life got in the way.
I sent the drives to a 3rd party recovery company and they were able to pull the data off but it really wasn't useable because of the encryption on the SAN - the hopes were to recover the data back to additional drives and pull that back in with EMC's help to decrypt it. It wasn't possible.
Time moved on and this forum replaced it.
With all of that said, recently I had another project helping someone move a large application from on-prem to Azure and I used a few servers that I keep going across the US to do that and I was digging through a ton of files that I've collected over the years and I found several TB of daily/weekly/monthly backups of the old forum scattered around.
I would need to install NetBackup, a really old version - lol - and try to roll those up in to a useable collection. I'm not sure how recent I can go but there is a possibility to be able to bring it back. For what it's worth, the last differential was October of 2015.
I don't mind to put the work in to try and stand it back up in a read-only state for archive reference. Not to mention, I'm not even sure I can get the old IPB version it was running on.
There might be some good data there, things like Ivan, Katrina, April 27th. Some of those threads were legendary.
I think it would be neat, but do any of you even care about that anymore? Do any of the old Admin's still remember your account info and passwords?
I'm sure a lot of you remember the old forum and like myself, miss the data that was contained within it.
Long story short, the old forum had a few problems once a lot of people were refreshing to see the latest posts if there was ever a hint of a snow event in the SE. It was hosted in a shared environment and just didn't have the resources.
There was not much in regard to sponsorship and around the 2008 timeframe I was hosting upwards of 5000 clients in various markets all on dedicated servers out of Chicago and Phoenix. I enjoyed the forum and told Jack I would handle the hardware and bandwidth.. It was neat seeing it handle a lot of people during the Feb 2014 snow event. Pretty sure that was it's standing record.
In 2015 I was relocated for work to Columbus, OH and in early 2016 I sold that hosting business but kept the old forum running on a pair of servers in Phoenix. The SAN that was handling the storage had a failure and IIRC, I was about to fly to Mexico or Canada the next morning so I paid for the datacenter staff to go hands on and swap drives. In the end, the hands on techs brought the SAN out of the fault but in the process of rebuilding the array, deleted upwards of 130TB worth of data. They admitted later that they were unsure of a step and picked the first option which was anything but rebuild but did not call me to confirm. Basically, it was wiped and new empty LUN's were presented to the servers.
Sadly, that SAN also held the backups for the forum and a few other sites. I should have just waited to land wherever and handled it myself but work life got in the way.
I sent the drives to a 3rd party recovery company and they were able to pull the data off but it really wasn't useable because of the encryption on the SAN - the hopes were to recover the data back to additional drives and pull that back in with EMC's help to decrypt it. It wasn't possible.
Time moved on and this forum replaced it.
With all of that said, recently I had another project helping someone move a large application from on-prem to Azure and I used a few servers that I keep going across the US to do that and I was digging through a ton of files that I've collected over the years and I found several TB of daily/weekly/monthly backups of the old forum scattered around.
I would need to install NetBackup, a really old version - lol - and try to roll those up in to a useable collection. I'm not sure how recent I can go but there is a possibility to be able to bring it back. For what it's worth, the last differential was October of 2015.
I don't mind to put the work in to try and stand it back up in a read-only state for archive reference. Not to mention, I'm not even sure I can get the old IPB version it was running on.
There might be some good data there, things like Ivan, Katrina, April 27th. Some of those threads were legendary.
I think it would be neat, but do any of you even care about that anymore? Do any of the old Admin's still remember your account info and passwords?