Corrupted data or is it just me?

[Nezhul]

So, take my signature for instance. There are some strange symbols that weren't there before.

Step one: Crawl inside.
Step two: Screws go tight all around.
Cross my heart and hope to die…
…Stick a needle in your eye.

Or take denton's profile
http://www.milovana.com/forum/memberlis ... le&u=10829
I see some alien code under "location" field (I think it means that he's from Crab Nebula)

Location:
40°07′07″N 76°02′50″W

Is it only me or is it the forum issue?

[neo36]

Mine looks fine

[Nezhul]

You mean your data? It's not all users who has those glitches. Do you see those in the places I described above, or do you see everything fine?

[Nes]

I see yours as you described in the OP

[janmb]

Last line in your signature looks a little garbled yes....

And if any data at all are corrupt that lends the question how much more is....

I've been working with this board system and had a database act up on me a few times myself and getting that back together is certainly not easy short of a flat out restore like I suspect seraph did...

Anyone else but me get redirected to some "default website from the hosting company" a few minutes ago?

[J4mes]

Anyone else but me get redirected to some "default website from the hosting company" a few minutes ago?

Yes happened to me a number of times today.

[jp]

This happened the last time there was a server hiccup, too. Even webteases were hit by the "bug". Don't remember if there was a resolution or if things had to be manually fixed.

[seraph0x]

Sorry guys, charset screwup.

I fixed everything I could find, but I didn't do all the profile fields so it's possible something still slipped through. Let me know if you find any more.

This happened the last time there was a server hiccup, too. Even webteases were hit by the "bug". Don't remember if there was a resolution or if things had to be manually fixed.

I think there were a couple of these. MySQL defaults to Latin1 for god knows what reason, but our database is in UTF8. So it's pretty easy to forget to set the correct charset when importing stuff. I think I always fix it once it gets reported.

Especially if it affects webteases and/or forum posts, manually fixing is pretty much out of the question, at that point we're talking about many tens of thousands of pages/posts.

I've been working with this board system and had a database act up on me a few times myself and getting that back together is certainly not easy short of a flat out restore like I suspect seraph did...

A full restore would have undone all changes that happened between the 21st when the error occurred and the 26th when I had a chance to fix it, so that wasn't an option. (If I rolled back the database one day I'd get complaints. Three days - I'd get serious unrest. Five days - I'd be straight up lynched. )

Fortunately the corruption was limited to a single table - the users table - and there was no incorrect data, only missing rows. So what I did was edit the backup for that table replacing the INSERT statements with INSERT IGNORE. That way, no changes were overwritten - only the missing rows were restored. Voila good as new. Except I picked the wrong charset - oh well.

Anyone else but me get redirected to some "default website from the hosting company" a few minutes ago?

That would be pretty odd - we use co-located servers only, no webspace. The only page that I can think of that you might get if something goes wrong is our "bad virtualhost" page (example). Maybe a URL typo?

[seraph0x]

It was a default page for PleskDesk.

We're not using Plesk on any of our servers, so this would indicate a routing issue. Maybe our server's IP was routed incorrectly for a short time. Or this is an April Fools joke and you guys got me good.

[janmb]

Fortunately the corruption was limited to a single table - the users table - and there was no incorrect data, only missing rows. So what I did was edit the backup for that table replacing the INSERT statements with INSERT IGNORE. That way, no changes were overwritten - only the missing rows were restored. Voila good as new. Except I picked the wrong charset - oh well.

Lucky thing indeed. The issues I have been charged with fixing a few times have involved bad references from one table into others, illegal data combinations etc etc. Real pita.

Anyone else but me get redirected to some "default website from the hosting company" a few minutes ago?

That would be pretty odd - we use co-located servers only, no webspace. The only page that I can think of that you might get if something goes wrong is our "bad virtualhost" page (example). Maybe a URL typo?

Definitely no typo - I used browser history (name completion) and/or bookmarks. Pretty much never type the full URL anymore.

And others (j4mes) had the same redirect so definitely more real than a user glitch.

[seraph0x]

Definitely no typo - I used browser history (name completion) and/or bookmarks. Pretty much never type the full URL anymore.

And others (j4mes) had the same redirect so definitely more real than a user glitch.

Yeah, based on the reports I got my guess is that one of our IPs was temporarily routed to somebody else's server. Our new host has had a couple of short-lived glitches with their network in the few months we've been with them. Not great, but as a new customer you're often located in newer racks which have more frequent changes and maintenance, at least that's been my experience in the past.

Other than that, they are fantastic. We reduced our total hosting bill by a third and that's with higher spare capacity than we had before. The support is amazing, motivated and tiptop qualified.

As of right now I think there is reason to be optimistic about uptime in 2012. The image change is completed and after a bunch of tweaking, our static file serving now seems to be working pretty reliably. One of those two things might have been the reason behind the recent crashes. Unless something like that happens again, I think we're finally on solid footing. For the first time in months I feel like the servers aren't about to fall apart at any second.

[les]

Time to get new curtains fitted and
Start enjoying a good nights sleep.