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HelioHost

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What are we doing? We're still working on creating backups. It's taking longer than we expected.

 

What did we lose? As far as we can tell at this point no data will be lost. Right now we're backing up the home directories, and archived accounts. As is the case in most crashes, the mysql innodb databases have a very poor chance of being recovered, but we're going to do our best to try to back them up as well. We always recommend people use myisam, and we have it set as default, for this very reason. Innodb data pretty much always gets lost during a crash. The mysql myisam databases are for sure intact. Postgresql databases have been backed up, but it's too early to tell if anything was lost. We'll make a news post when the backups are available for download.

 

What should you do? It's going to be a while before we can get Tommy back online, and when we do it's going to be a fresh server with no accounts on it. This means you should probably create a temporary account on Johnny or Ricky in the meantime, and once Tommy is rebuilt you can have your account moved back onto Tommy. As far as your domains go it's probably safest to just make sure your account is created, and then we can straighten out the domains later. If you need a domain freed up that was hosted on Tommy just make a post on the forums requesting it. Once the backups are available we'll let you know via a news post and you can download them and restore them on to your temporary account.

 

What happens next? We have ordered a new hard drive for Tommy, and Ashoat (the founder of HelioHost) is going to be at our datacenter in silicon valley next Tuesday the 20th. While he's there he's going to install Sparkie in our cabinet, and replace the dead hard drive from Eddie, which will allow us to rebuild Tommy.

 

How long until Tommy is back? We don't have a set date, but getting Tommy back online is our top priority. As long as everything goes as planned, the new hard drive will be installed on August 20th, and it will take a few days after that to set everything up and test the new server. Tommy should be back, with better uptime, even faster, and better than ever before by September 1st. Maybe sooner.

 

What happened? One of Eddie's hard drives that held critical system files for Tommy died, but luckily it wasn't the hard drives that held the home directories or databases. Since it was operating system files that were lost it means that Tommy won't boot or connect to the internet or run any programs or do much of anything right now, but we are trying to back everything up.

 

Why did this happen? It's no secret that we're very short on cash. This is why we have a fundraiser going. We push everything as far as it's possible to go. That means pushing old hardware as long as it can go, pushing cpanel to handle more accounts than even the creators of cpanel ever expected, and unfortunately pushing old hard drives much longer than is reasonable.

 

Will this happen to Tommy again? Probably not. The hard drive that failed is about 10 years old, and has been running constantly since we bought the server. We're replacing it with a brand-new, fresh-from-the-factory, never-been-used hard drive.

 

We understand that this is a very confusing time, and you all have a lot of questions. Hopefully this answered some of the common ones, but if you have other questions please ask away. Thanks for your patience.

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Now, if you were on tommy and do not do anythings (such as creating/moving account to other servers, such as, ricky etc.) --

    Would the userid, password and home directories be restored on Tommy (as best as you can)?, and

    Would the account expiry period (due to inactivity) be extended on Tommy?

 

Or ... do we all have to re-request new logins on Tommy, with the same or different domains?

 

Thanks.

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You can have your account normally, as it is, if you don't want o get another one now. However, you might be losing out on visitors if you do run a production site, otherwise if you experiment its all right for you. Yeah everything's gonna remain the same.

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Now, if you were on tommy and do not do anythings (such as creating/moving account to other servers, such as, ricky etc.) --

    Would the userid, password and home directories be restored on Tommy (as best as you can)?, and

No, the backups will not automatically be restored on the new Tommy after he's rebuilt. Unfortunately, Tommy is too dead to do any automated backup/restore scripts, and we don't have the staff/time to restore thousands of accounts one by one by hand. We will provide the backups through the https://www.heliohost.org/backup/ system when they are ready, and it will require you to download the files and restore them yourself onto whatever temporary or new Tommy account you make.

 

  Would the account expiry period (due to inactivity) be extended on Tommy?

Or ... do we all have to re-request new logins on Tommy, with the same or different domains?

After the data is fully backed up, the old Tommy accounts will be deleted from the system. Once Tommy v2 is ready we will make a news post, and you can request a Tommy invite or, if you made a temporary account on Rick or Johnny, we can move your account back to Tommy. We will have a list of all the accounts that existed on Tommy at the time of the crash, and if you're on the list you'll be able to get right back onto Tommy without having to donate again or be fast enough to sign up at midnight UTC. After a new server is built there is a period of time where we have to scale up slowly and tweak things a little to get the best performance, so we may not send out all the invites and move everyone back all at once. We may need to stagger it over some time depending on how many request to get back on Tommy.
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From what I can make out, the email addresses linked to Tommy are used for downloading backups. Does that mean we should create our temporary Ricky accounts using a different email address (and possibly change it back once the whole thing is cleared up)?

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You can create a temporary account on Ricky with a different email address than the past (lest you should have problems while downloading your backup). Your domains can be cleaned up if you wish to, and you can host the same ones on your temporary account.

 

After Tommy is back your new account will be moved to Tommy.

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1. You create a Ricky account.

2. Use the account for your website after backups have been released (or use your own backup, we strongly encourage people to take their own backup).

3. Once Tommy is back, your account will be moved to Tommy. Your old Tommy account will be gone.

 

Side note: Please use a different email address than the one you used to sign up for your old Tommy account.

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Side note: Please use a different email address than the one you used to sign up for your old Tommy account.

Whaaat, why??

 

(But I guess that maybe I can just make an alias in Gmail)

Edited by cridus
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Side note: Please use a different email address than the one you used to sign up for your old Tommy account.

Whaaat, why??

 

(But I guess that maybe I can just make an alias in Gmail)

You can’t use the same email address that you have it on your old Tommy account and use it a temporary account on Ricky. Just wait until all of the old Tommy accounts are delete it and then you can use it on your temporary account.
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