Disaster Aftermath

[SteveColes]

my screwups on wed have caused a lot of lost work. A lot of changes that I made were lost. Well, that's not quite true, just the template changes.

For instance if you look at the welcome block on the right hand side, it is now displaying just like it was before. However, the code(welcome.php) that supplied the data is still working.

The biggest issue that comes out of this, is our backups. When I realized the Thanksgiving style install had somehow screwed up our default templates, I went to our DB last daily backup and just restored the templates table and the templates history. Much to my surprise all the templates that I had changed recently seem to be older versions. I then sae the the actual date on the file was over a month old. I assumed that realwebhost was now storing the backups in a different place. (That had happened before.) I put in a support ticket to find out where and I was informed. That I was in the in the right place. After much back and forth, I discovered that backups had not been taken since October 24. So the "Daily" I restored was from then.

For those who understand, backups are run as chron jobs. But chrond has not been running since 10/24. Why? Becuase cPanel has not been starting it. A bug. Supposedly thebug is fixed and chrond is now one of the demons started at startup.. No apology, just applied the fix:kamahlitu

Anyway, I have started fixing some things and we'll go from there. I will probably make "list" in to do forum and perhaps some of you can fix some things. Also if you see something wrong, please add it to the todo list.

We also have to come up with a way of know that our backups are running.

 

[Bas]

As far as disasters go, it could be a lot worse. While it will take a lot of effort to reapply the changes to the templates, at least we haven't lost any postings. That stuff can't be replaced.

Please post what you think needs done, and I'll help any way I can.

Regarding backups - I remember we talked about this. Happened to me a couple of times, backup tape turned out to be blank, etc. How about we add a cron job that checks whether there is actually a database backup file, and that the date is only one day difference. The job can then e-mail the web masters that it verified it exists. Should the cron jobs stop altogether, well, the absence of e-mail would be an alarm bell.
l
Of course, the fact that there is a backup file doesn't mean the data is actually correct. That would require something more sophisticated. But let's start simple. If you can divulge where the backups are stored, I can write such a script.

 

[toolman]

Dave has be helping Berta on DQ name, address, ...... I checked the usercp and the crash must have got it as well, because it is not there. I have looked at some temp.. put they are over my head at this time.

Dave sorry for stepping on your toes,:embaresse

[evil]The Dark Side Got To Me Again![/evil]

 

[SteveColes]

Please post what you think needs done, and I'll help any way I can.

Regarding backups - I remember we talked about this. Happened to me a couple of times, backup tape turned out to be blank, etc. How about we add a cron job that checks whether there is actually a database backup file, and that the date is only one day difference. The job can then e-mail the web masters that it verified it exists. Should the cron jobs stop altogether, well, the absence of e-mail would be an alarm bell.
l
Of course, the fact that there is a backup file doesn't mean the data is actually correct. That would require something more sophisticated. But let's start simple. If you can divulge where the backups are stored, I can write such a script.

Divulging where the files are is no problem, testing for their existence might be a problem. There is no single file. Also, these files or directories may not be testable because of ownership and permissions.

All that said, here is the pertinent info:

Basic files in the ncwoodwo space are kept as individual files in the exact same file structure.

So you would need to su (password later)
mount /dev/sdb1
test the following directories' and files' creation date as the same day as the day the script executes.

/backup/cpbackup/daily/dirs/_var_lib_mysql_/ncwoodwo_vbull

/backup/cpbackup/daily/ncwoodwo/homedir

/backup/cpbackup/daily/ncwoodwo/mysql/ncwoodwo_vbull.sql

unmount /dev/sdb1