Recent Forum Outage

[Robert Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close Robert]

A big apology to everyone who uses this forum.

There have been major issues with the webserver running this forum. These issues have caused the forum to be unavailable for the last day.

Fortunately, the server has been recovered, but the software running it has had to be reinstalled. There has been a problem with the backup as well, which was only discovered upon restore to have been corrupted since July.

What this means is that when the forum is restored, all the recent posts, user registrations etc will be lost. I am deeply saddened and annoyed about this, but there is little that can be done about it now.

Now that the forum is back up, I’d like to offer my sincerest apologies to anyone who has lost information that was stored in here and I hope that soon the community here will help to re-do whatever information was missed.

I'm personally really annoyed that all that work that was done by ABU on the election submissions is gone. I'll try and retrieve what I can from my PC (and from google cache, while it lasts!) I realise also that many of you have contributed many hours worth of typing and I feel your pain, I really do.

In the future, I'll be taking my own manual backups of the site's database regularly and not just trusting them to someone else's automated backup. (The files that construct the site were OK on the backup up to yesterday, but the database containing all the real info was bad).

[Robert Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close Robert]

Re: Recent Forum Outage

Also... I am hoping that despite all the disparate versions of different backups and upgrades, that everything still works as it should. There are a few modifications that I'd done in the last 6 months which I will still have to put back, but overall, everything should run much the same way.

If you experience any behaviour from the forum which does not seem usual, please let me know.

[Guest Close David]

Re: Recent Forum Outage

I think a few of us were having withdrawal Symptoms! I was getting emails and personal visits from people asking what happened to the forum??

I think I remember you saying a relative ran the hosting company Robert But Geez, this site has had more outages than any other I have seen thanks to them.
I see the clock has certainly been wound back a long ways.... 300 odd posts for me! Shows I spend toooo much time here!
I probably have quite a few of my posts as I often write them in word so I can check them and come back to them the 3 or 4 times I have to, to get my long winded drivel finished, but they wouldn't make much sense on their own... even if they ever do in context let alone without it.

There was some really good info people had posted which is a great shame to have lost but on to bigger and better things 'eh!

Thanks for all your hard work and I'm sure frustration with this Robert. You have created something that means a great deal to many people here and has been the catalyst for a lot of friendships and good times.
I'm sure I speak on behalf of all forum users when I say your efforts are greatly appreciated.

[Matt0 Junior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Matt0]

Re: Recent Forum Outage

Robert,
As a forum administrator myself, I too feel your pain.

Remember that it's not the code and database that makes a good forum - it's the people who use it, and their willingness to help others and contribute.

Keep up the good work

[gwalker Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close gwalker]

Re: Recent Forum Outage

I'm glad you are back!

[Captain Echidna Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Captain Echidna]

Re: Recent Forum Outage

Oh the wandering the house, wondering where why, and what was going to fill give my life meaning again.....

Anyway glad its back. How much information is on peoples hard drives, and is it useful? (like what I have dragged out on how political parties responded?) or is it like trying to rebuild the tree from the sawdust?

If you were wondering how to vote, the greens provided this resonse. I dont think any others had before the crash.

Australian Greens’ Response


Climate change is real, serious and urgent. So is the looming problem of oil depletion. These interlinked crises require nothing less than a transformation of the world’s economies and societies to live within the Earth’s ecological limits. The move to a low carbon economy, with minimal greenhouse gas emissions and reduced reliance on raw materials, brings with it enormous opportunities to create a healthier, happier and more secure future. All we need is political will. The Greens have the will, backed by comprehensive policies and strategies.


Energy Security Questions:

1. What does your party plan to do to secure Australia’s liquid fuel supply in the coming era of Peak Oil?

The Greens initiated the Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport Committee Report into Australia’s future oil supply and alternative fuels which reported in February 2007.
Parliament of Australia:Senate:Committees:Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport:Inquiry into Australia's future oil supply and alternative transport fuels

Some of our specific policies include –
·Forge, promote and sign a global oil depletion protocol under which oil importing nations will reduce their imports each year by the rate at which the world’s oil reserves are being depleted. The advantage is a planned transition away from oil.
·Establish a national oil-independence commission as in Sweden, Cuba, Ireland and Iceland.
·Phase out subsidies for oil and other fossil fuels and replace them with incentives for renewable energy and energy efficiency.


2. In the light of the forecast Peak Oil and the potential increases in crude oil and refined product prices, what plans do your party have to deal with the resultant fuel shortages and high prices?

Future transport planning has to be tied to likely increases in petrol prices. Policies include:
·Establish a national federally-funded goal of replacing 90% of petrol demand by 2050, with electricity from renewable sources used in electric vehicles and biofuels made from high energy-conversion-ratio feedstocks.
·Multi-billion dollar investments over ten years to upgrade Australia’s rail transport infrastructure and urban public transport, including allocation of at least 25% of the $22.3 billion AusLink 2 funding for 2009-10 to 2013-14 to major infrastructure projects that shift people or freight off roads and onto more efficient alternatives.
·Introduce mandatory fuel-efficiency performance standards for all corporate and government car fleets, and convert all government fleets to petrol/electric hybrids or gas-powered vehicles.


3. What place do you see sustainable biofuels taking in the fuel mix post Peak Oil?

Using transport energy more efficiently and shifting the load to public transport and rail will not be enough. Widespread uptake of renewable transport fuels is essential for Australia eventually to become independent of oil and reduce its transport greenhouse gas emissions to zero.

We would introduce a 10% minimum biofuel use target for renewable transport fuel by 2020.




Fuel Excise Questions:

1. What is your party's position on the application of fuel excise to biofuels:
a. On commercially produced biofuels (ethanol, butanol & biodiesel);
b. On user produced biofuels for personal usage (no supply to another party);
c. On company produced biofuels for in-house usage (no supply to another party).

The Greens would extend the biofuel excise holiday indefinitely and remove the GST from the sale of biofuels. User produced biofuels should be exempt from the excise system altogether.


2. Does your party support excise parity between petroleum fuels and biofuels? If not, what excise structure do you propose, to replace the existing excise regime?

Transport fuel excise should be replaced with a carbon tax to put a price on emissions.


Sustainable Agriculture and Production Questions:

1. What does your party intend to do in relation to 2nd generation biofuels crops and production?
2. What plans does your party have to encourage sustainable biofuel crops to be planted in Australia to ensure our future fuel supply?
3. What investment does your party intend to make into future biofuels technologies?

Second generation biofuel crops have the potential to cut greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on fossil fuels significantly. They also have potential to overcome the conflict between food and fuel crops for land and water but, like any new development, must be subject to stringent standards for protecting biodiversity and ensuring sustainability.

The Greens' Farming Renewable Energy policy sets out a strategic plan to meet the challenges of revitalising regional Australia and developing a new, renewable energy-focused energy grid by encouraging and helping farmers to become renewable energy generators. It provides a framework to guide both the public and private sector to guide the strategic development of renewable energy networks on a scale and speed sufficient to address the challenge of climate change.

The policy would see the establishment of Renewable Energy Development Zones, streamlining approvals and building connections to the electricity grid to make investment in those areas simple and attractive.




Details: Greens Election 2007
Re-energising Australia.
Farming Renewable Energy

[Robert Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close Robert]

Re: Recent Forum Outage

I was thinking that not having the forum would make a few of us actually go out and play. I was imagining loads of people pushing back from their computer screens, rubbing their eyes and going out and blinking in the bright light outside. I should have been doing this myself, but I'll save that for when I've got things back as far as I can.

Re the hosting, yeah it run by a relative - my brother. He's got a server that he's shelled out lots of time and money on. Then he's got it in a datacentre where he has to pay for the rent on the rackspace, electricity, bandwidth and fees for availability and access. He does not do it for a business, or he would have been broke long ago. He does it for a hobby, but like me, he's wondering if it's all worth it. Especially with all the extra time he pours into it with little or no return, only agro.

There are some sites that pay him money, but the CHF100 per year per site barely covers his ongoing costs, let alone the money he's spent on hardware, software or his time. He's just spent $800 on new packages for the server software following this outage as he needed to rebuild it quickly from up to date software when the backups did not restore (the previous packages were a couple of years old, but had been updated as they ran).

He's been letting me run a few biofuels sites for free which has been great and is exactly what has allowed this forum to get to where it is. I've recently paid off my own software costs through donations and just last week I was able to contribute some money from these donations back to buy a new dedicated IP address for the forum and 1 years hosting backlog.

Now as for the downtime, apart from 1 scheduled outage in the last year when the server was relocated and was only off for a couple of hours, there have been no hosting problems. There have been 1 or 2 times when some of Australia's backbones have failed to Europe and also some occasions when some of the bigger ISPs (like Bigpond) had some issues with European sites which they refused to acknowledge for a couple of weeks. Apart from that, the server uptime has been pretty good, especially for a service that is being given on a "pay what you can when you can" basis!

There have been a few outages to upgrade various parts of the forum as well, but these have been nothing to do with the hosting, this is when I have personally taken the forum offline to fix things or improve things. I'll only do these things in small doses and usually at times when the forum is not too busy. Sadly, many of the changes, security fixes, patches, upgrades and tweaks for the last 6 months have been lost and I will have to re-do them, so expect a few more minor outages.

If anyone wants to know any of the more technical reasons as to why the last few months of data went missing, let me know and I'll post it.

Hey Matt0, you are completely right, it is the people who make the forum, so I am not really upset about losing the data nearly as much as the trust of the people who entered it and expected it to stay there. I'm well annoyed about losing loads of my own work, but that really does pale into insignificance when I think about what everyone else has done/lost. I'm sure from the friendly and helpful culture that has developed in here that this community will recover quickly and be back on track again soon.
(Also Matt0, If you want, perhaps we could help each other administer each other's forums?)

If anyone has lost anything and can remember the specifics, google cache may be able to help you restore it, but it will have to be done quickly before it expires. If you search on specific words and get a google match then instead of clicking the link (which will not be there as the data is lost), click on the "cached" link under it. Google will then display a copy of what it found to build that search. You can copy and paste this back into the forum. Not elegant, but effective in some cases. I've been using this to restore some of the recent work I've lost on the ABU site and some others.

Anyway, enough typing, I'd better get back to it!

[Robert Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close Robert]

Re: Recent Forum Outage

Thanks Chris, every bit helps! Fortunately, I've got most of the election stuff from google cache and from my own harddrive and I'll be posting it up in the next hour or so. I'm also going to re-post the next Sydney picnic thread as well.

[pangit Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close pangit]

Re: Recent Forum Outage

Wow, I really feel for you Robert, what a pain! It's only a minor inconvenience for most of us (if at all) but must have created a lot of extra work for you, and it's a shame to lose all that valuable information/advice etc. I'll put my fuelling trolley pics back as I had copied the original post onto another site, so I'll just copy it back!

Bummer about the backup! It's a good illustration of the importance of backing up their critical data on their PCs regularly (digital photos especially), and periodically test the backup!

And I have to disagree with David - I've never seen any other forum outages - it's normally reliable as clockwork.

As a note to anyone having trouble logging in - if you have changed your password since July it will have reset to the previous one.

I noticed my avatar had gone, so I managed to find the original image in my Recycle bin and I restored it!

[pangit Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close pangit]

Re: Recent Forum Outage

If anyone has lost anything and can remember the specifics, google cache may be able to help you restore it, but it will have to be done quickly before it expires. If you search on specific words and get a google match then instead of clicking the link (which will not be there as the data is lost), click on the "cached" link under it. Google will then display a copy of what it found to build that search. You can copy and paste this back into the forum. Not elegant, but effective in some cases. I've been using this to restore some of the recent work I've lost on the ABU site and some others.

I've just managed to restore most of the thread about my fuelling trolley (as if anyone's interested in it! ) partly from another forum, but also from Google's cache.

To add to Robert's advice if you want to restrict the Google search to just this site you can either go to Google Advanced Search and put in the box "Only return results from the site or domain" www.biofuelsforum.com or just type site:www.biofuelsforum.com at the end of your search term in the main search page.

E.g. this is what I did:
my fuelling trolley site:www.biofuelsforum.com
and it came up with 4 posts, which I then clicked on the "cached" link to find most of the posts, which I just copied and pasted into a new post.

[Robert Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close Robert]

Re: Recent Forum Outage

Thanks Sean - that's the spirit!

[Robert Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close Robert]

Carnage Statistics:

These are the figures of what has been lost in the forum:

There are nearly 500 accounts lost as members has gone from 2666 to 2181. There's also 3,615 posts gone and 690 threads. This is based on comparing the current stats on the bottom of the main page with those from google's cache of 3 days ago.

Any people who have registered in the past 4 months or so, please don't be offended that your account and posts have gone, please re-register.

[Guest Close David]

Re: Recent Forum Outage

And I have to disagree with David - I've never seen any other forum outages - it's normally reliable as clockwork.

Must be something on my end then. Maybe the system just gets sick of me logging on.
I hope I didn't cause any offense Robert.

I have lost a lot of info on my computer this year, 4 HDD crashes to be exact. I am about to install a raid system that automatically backs everything up to a 2nd Drive. If one falls over, the data on the other is preserved and a new drive can simply be connected and backed up automatically.

[Robert Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close Robert]

Re: Recent Forum Outage

I hope I didn't cause any offense Robert.

Nah, of course not. None taken.

I am about to install a raid system that automatically backs everything up to a 2nd Drive. If one falls over, the data on the other is preserved and a new drive can simply be connected and backed up automatically

Assuming that your crashes have been hardware related, then this will solve the issue. However in my experience, most problems are data related not the physical media. This means that if you have a mirrored RAID array, the corrupt data is written to both discs in the array (so your redundancy becomes redundant). I've also had problems where a dual power supply server, running a raid array had a controller failure, causing both power supplies to wink off. This happened at the time that the RAID array was writing to both discs. Each disc ended up corrupted, but at different places. I had to explain to a large bank that depended on this system for all their voice trading why the dual redundant systems did not help them. The end result was recommending that they buy an entirely new standby system with identical hardware on hot standby ready to run if the other system failed. Of course you can go silly with disaster recovery (or "Business Continuity" as it is now called), but it will cost BIG $$$.

But I digress. The point is that RAID is a great idea, but it didn't save the webserver in this case, as it was running RAID, as it was a software and data corruption issue.

[Robert Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close Robert]

Re: Recent Forum Outage

Sorry everyone. Server's been up and down again this morning. Still lots of problems and loose ends to iron out. Hopefully it will be solved soon.