Category: Site News

This website is very old. It’s been with me for many years. There are plenty of articles which are useful both for myself and the rest of the world. Bit by bit, word by word, link by link, image by image, this site was filled and filled over the years. Technologies changed. Some new techniques and concepts came up. Some old ones faded away. Spending as much time as I possible can (after everything else) on this site, sometimes I manage to introduce big changes – like a new bit of functionality or a totally different look. Not to confuse and scare everyone, I try to be open about the changes that were made. When something big is changed I post a description of what it was and why I felt the change was needed. These updates are published in this category.

What will happen

The data loss was horrible, but life still goes on. Since I already told you what happened, I’d like to share my thoughts on what will happen.

Firstly, as you can see, here goes a new blog – from scratch, with no archives or pretty looks. Just yet. As with everything else, there is some good in everything bad. And the data loss is not an exception. Having archives for 10+ years is cool. But it also requires a tremendous amount of work in maintenance – moving things around, correcting them, making sure everything is at least visible in yet another new theme – that takes a lot of effort. With all those archives gone now, I don’t have to restructure or re-organize. I can start a new. And I will.

Secondly, I will move movie reviews into a separate blog. I tried it already before and then merge the reviews back in. But now I think the time came to try it once again. I’ve been trying quite a few ideas for my reviews lately, and I like where it goes. For example, using directors, actors, and genres as tags in separate taxonomies finally made it easier for me to find movies by actor or director combination. There is a lot that can be expanded and tried out there. So, stay tuned.

Thirdly, I want to extend the networking part of mamchenkov.net a bit. Back when I bought the domain, I was the only Mamchenkov using it. Now there is a small crowd, with my brother, my mother (blog lost together with mine, but will be restarted), and a few posts that I’ve been doing on behalf of my kid (two very outdated blogs, one of which was lost too). Plus there is a whole range of RSS feeds from Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, and such, that should be grouped together somehow. I am trying out the Planet software for that and so far it looks good.

Fourthly, with all those archives gone and blogs destroyed, there will be a huge black void, which, I am sure, will inspire more blogging. That is of course just my wild guess.

Now that my mind recovers from the loss (not without the help of friends and alcohol), I am having more and more ideas on what I want to do and where I want to go with this. I hope I’ll have the will and strength to pull it over.

What happened?

The long story short : I lost my blog, as well as a few other web sites.

Here goes the longer version. I have been moving a whole bunch of web sites from my reseller hosting account at EuroVPS to a brand new VPS account at VAServ. Site by site, blog by blog, database by database. To keep things simple, once I made sure that the site was moved properly, I deleted the copy from the old hosting (after a week or so).

When I was almost done with the move and there were just a few more left, something really bad happened a VAServ. All company’s servers got compromised. The attackers gained control over thousands of VPS accounts across hundreds of servers, and then they deleted whatever they could. The effect of this was so devastating that it was extensively covered in the news.

According the VAServ, hackers utilized a security hole in the HyperVM software, which was written by LXLabs. Apparently, HyperVM is known for its poor security, but things never went wrong at this scale. (In other news, LXLabs founder was found dead in a suspected suicide a day or so later. And the rumour has it that the break-in had nothing to do with HyperVM, but was VAServ negligence)

Now for the most interesting part of the story – the lost data. How did that happen? OK, the company got hacked and all data was deleted. But what about the backups? It turned out, there were no tape backups. The only backups VAServ had were on the network storage. And, of course, that data got deleted by the attackers. Imagine that. Web sites, databases, emails, DNS records. Everything is gone. Well, not everything – they managed to recover some servers, but not all by far.

My sites were on one of those servers which experienced 100% data loss, and which had no backup. That was when I contacted EurVPS support and asked them to restore my recently deleted sites from tapes. After all, it’s better to lose a few weeks of work, rather than a few years. Guess what? It turned out, EuroVPS has no backups either. When I insisted, saying that backups are a part of my hosting plan, they corrected themselves and said that they have backups, but, as advertised on the site – weekly only.

Let me ask you a simple question. How do you understand the phrase “weekly backups on tape”? My understanding was that there’s a scheduled backup task (every weekend or so), which dumps data on tapes, and those tapes are moved out of the building somewhere. Eventually, of course, they are rotated (monthly, or annually, or so). But there is a certain period which you can go back to and restore from those weekly tapes.

It so happened, my understanding was wrong. Weekly tape backup means one backup within a week on tape. That is, there is no way to go more than one week back using tape backups. I was shocked a bit, but there was still a chance to get something. I clearly remember that I deleted two sites five days ago. I asked EuroVPS support to restore at least those. To which they replied that those two sites aren’t on the backups either.

What? How? Err… I know, of course, that the loss of data is my fault as much as theirs. I should have done my own backups, downloading them to my own machine. And I’m deeply sorry for not doing so. But on the other hand, having paid for hosting, I do expect uninterrupted power, redundant network connection, and properly organized backups. If that’s not how commercial hosting is different from home servers, than I don’t know how.

Currently, I am setting up a new VPS host, reconfiguring domains for the new IP, installing a bunch of WordPress blogs, and issuing a whole lot of apologies. Those things that can be recovered, will be recovered. Those things that were important and were lost, will be started a new. And those things that were not important and were lost, will remain lost.

Let this be yet another painful lesson on the importance of backups.

Upgraded to WordPress 2.7

I’ve just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.7, and yes, it’s as good as they said it would be. The new interface is looks better, is more convenient, and even feels faster. Things are somehow closer to where they should be and overall it makes more sense. However, I am yet to test it on a few non-technical bloggers who I help with blog hosting and administration.

The upgrade itself was fast and painless as usual – just overwrite the old files with new, visit administration, and click on a button to upgrade the database structure when asked so. That’s it. I’ve also scrolled through the Settings section just to see what’s new (a few things are), and that’s about it.

I’ve noticed that there are a few glitches here and there, most of which are related to plugins that I am using. Hopefully I’ll sort them out soon. In the worst case scenario, they will be taken care of in the new design that is in the works for this blog.

Hosting downtime

None of the sites hosted on my sever were accessible for most of yesterday. That was caused by some emergency maintenace done by the hosting company. They didn’t warn me before, so I weren’t aware of it coming and for how long it would last.

This is the third downtime for this month. Needless to say, I am not satisfied with the service no more. Firstly, the downtimes are too frequent and too lengthy. Secondly, total absense of notificatios – either before the downtime or after. No explanations. Nothing.

I’ve been with this hosting company for more than two years now and it was OK most of the time. But now, once again, I am thinking about moving somewhere else. Suggestions?

Comments are broken. Again.

Comments and a few other things are broken right now. I am aware of the problem and working to solve it. Thank you all for letting me know. I’ll post an update here once the issue is resolved.

Update: comments are fixed. It looks like it was a misconfiguration on the part of the hosting company (incorrect permissions for sessions directory).