Hmm, your words kept going through my head" back your posts up pete""
I thought it was the big one , its a bit like the san andreas fault , I might do a bit of cut and pasting.
Pete

For another two weeks or so, I think.

Down most of the day, now it's pot luck if it works, or error 503: Service Unavailable.

A so-called technical issue with the ISP has had the site off for most of today.

I'm guessing Optus based on what I read in today's news.

TPG.

What happened with Optus?

Here's some really bad news. We haven't been hit with it yet and hopefully won't be:-

https://www.itnews.com.au/news/massive-ransomware-outbreak-hits-servers-worldwide-466691

Optus was out everywhere today
All over the news on the radio I heard it.
I backed up all posts tonight ,just in case , pete

It may have had something to do with the loss of connection here - one never knows with the way the backbone networks of the major ISPs work.

Connections get lost, data is redirected, remaining data pipes become congested and the 'Net comes to a grinding halt.

I am aware of a few people who have been hit by ransomware last year; one I know personally. He opened an attachment in a bogus Australia Post email purporting to be advice of a parcel for collection and it proceeded to encrypt every file on his hard drive and then demanded US$650 in bitcoins to reverse the process.

Massively disruptive to his business. Of course he never backed up his PC.

Beware of every email attachment. This can't be said often enough.

I've seen the Post ones. There's another that comes from the Australian Federal Police that demands payment for a speeding fine. Most people don't know that the AFP doesn't issue speeding fines outside the ACT so plenty would click the link out of curiosity.

One came for me recently from the Australian Business Register asking me to renew a business name I once had. It was a close call, as the e-mail looked quite professional, came to the address that fair-dinkum ABR e-mails come to regarding my dealings with them and the business name was one I did actually own for a long time. Despite all that, the e-mail was indeed a fraud. The problem for the sender was that I don't own that many business and trading names that would cause me to lose track of the wheres and what fors.

I note the server logged in a lot faster tonight. One of the things we did at a shop was to have two backup units and these were rotated & transferred to another computer. That limited the amount of data we could loose.

Leaving your only back up device in permanently, is asking for trouble.

Yes to the camel. But the NBN is rolling out like an Octopus without a brain.

Marc

There's good news on that front. The server has two discs, so if one fails it can be changed without shutting the server down and then the remaining disc writes an image to the new disc, restoring the first layer of redundancy. Secondly, there's a weekly backup with a grandfathering routine which means many copies of the backup going back six months and then yearly a DVD is made of the whole site.

We had a server die here about five or six years ago - not a byte of data lost - thank Christ.

The new server is a step closer. In the meantime here's a code buster for commonly experienced errors:-

403 - permission to access the page is refused.
404 - the page is missing.
500 - server cannot complete loading of the page. (hundreds of possible reasons and some hard to find)
503 - web service is off. Some members have seen this in the last few days and it is just me rebooting the service to help keep things up as much as possible until the new server comes online.

All in all Brad this is a damned good site and sometimes I think how the hell do you do it.

I sometimes wonder myself! It took me about six days to create the basic structure of the forums in 2005. I must have been under a rush of adrenalin because I don't have any formal IT qualifications and at the time had little in the way of database experience.

It's been more good luck than good management. It was an experiment at the start but now that there's a large membership, it's a bit more serious.

Not sure if the planned Tuesday night server upgrade was performed, but I have received some 500 errors tonight after 5pm.

It was due to happen tonight but is being postponed. I'm stuck in bed with the wog so it'll go ahead in the next few days.