RM Web

adrian

adrian

Flying Squad
Marc Dobson said:
Sone good new and some bad. RMweb is up and running again but a years worth of data/posts have gone up in smoke. I will let you make your own minds up on which is the good or bad news!

Marc
Click to expand...
Actually not quite accurate. The full notification of the status is here
www.rmweb.co.uk

RMweb - Change of hosting, missing images - April 2022

Firstly, my apologies for the extended and unplanned absence of the site since Monday 21st March. It was evident that all was not well with site performance for a few weeks. I had been repeatedly advising and questioning the host’s (Dediserve) support since late January. Repeatedly they would pus...
www.rmweb.co.uk www.rmweb.co.uk

The written data/posts and threads have all been rescued as the databases containing that information was on a separate file system, so members posts will still be available from the last year. What appears to have been corrupted is any images uploaded in the last 12 months and it is just those that will be missing.
 
M

Marc Dobson

Western Thunderer
I stand corrected. That's better for me as as it means I don't have to go through all the kafuffle of why I changed the name of my company, again.

Marc
 
Pencarrow

Pencarrow

Western Thunderer
I think, given the circumstances that Andy Y outlines in the thread linked above, users are very lucky it's 'just' 12 months of photos missing. It could have been at lot worse had the backup for the posts not been stored separately by Andy.

I don't know much about server farms and the operation of the providers but surely having a forum backup on the same RAID array as the original is a stupid idea. Makes you wonder how permanent our digital footprint is. I had a load of images on Fotopics - remember them?
 
P

parky

Western Thunderer
A single failure tolerance in a RAID array is not very good when you consider the number of guests they would be running on the Hypervisor
There could possibly have been some alerts for disk errors that should have been followed up as once you get into multiple disk failures it's not good news Saying that if there are issues with the backplane then that is a whole different world of pain

The old adage of "your backup is only as good as your last successful restore" certainly ring true here. There is a lot more detail behind what went on behind the scenes, but I feel their pain and wish them well with their new service provider
 
Jim smith-wright

Jim smith-wright

Western Thunderer
Given from the Facebook rmweb server errors page the site has been slowly failing for at least 6 months, if not longer it seems there were plenty of warning signs.
 
michael080

michael080

Western Thunderer
looks like the provider was using a RAID array with only one drive redundancy (RAID5). This is considered unsecure for at least 10 years because the expected error rate of the drives is so high that a write error may happen while the array is restored. This means that the rebuilding process starts again and again. Rebuilding a RAID array basically rewrites every byte of disk space. Only two drive redundancy (RAID6) is considered safe these days.
Their second failure was trying to rebuld the array and evacuate data from the array at the same time. The correct strategy would be to stop the recovery process and evacuate all data ASAP. Rebuilding takes most of the bandwidth of the array so the evacuation takes much longer.

That should be standard procedure for a hosting provider.

Michael
 
adrian

adrian

Flying Squad
Just a quick note for anyone google searching and finding RMweb links. Unfortunately they haven't caught up with the new structure and the RMweb team haven't had time to implement URL redirects yet. So here's the workaround

So if google search gives you this https://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/155374-minerva-class-14-sitrep/

it will return page not found, a very droll "Euston we have a problem"- you need to remove the word "community" from the link in the address bar and it should start to work
https://www.rmweb.co.uk/index.php?/topic/155374-minerva-class-14-sitrep/

With friendly URLS enabled you can remove the "index.php?" as well if you so choose.
https://www.rmweb.co.uk/topic/155374-minerva-class-14-sitrep/

www.rmweb.co.uk

Minerva Class 14 SITREP

Minerva is pleased to report that the first engineering prototype (EP) of its 0 gauge RTR Class 14 0-6-0DH locomotive has been delivered for assessment. The project is running about 3 months late due to the Covid-19 situation. We are pleased with the general appearance and detail of the EP. The c...
www.rmweb.co.uk www.rmweb.co.uk
 
AJC

AJC

Western Thunderer
adrian said:
Just a quick note for anyone google searching and finding RMweb links. Unfortunately they haven't caught up with the new structure and the RMweb team haven't had time to implement URL redirects yet. So here's the workaround

So if google search gives you this https://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/155374-minerva-class-14-sitrep/

it will return page not found, a very droll "Euston we have a problem"- you need to remove the word "community" from the link in the address bar and it should start to work
https://www.rmweb.co.uk/index.php?/topic/155374-minerva-class-14-sitrep/

With friendly URLS enabled you can remove the "index.php?" as well if you so choose.
https://www.rmweb.co.uk/topic/155374-minerva-class-14-sitrep/

www.rmweb.co.uk

Minerva Class 14 SITREP

Minerva is pleased to report that the first engineering prototype (EP) of its 0 gauge RTR Class 14 0-6-0DH locomotive has been delivered for assessment. The project is running about 3 months late due to the Covid-19 situation. We are pleased with the general appearance and detail of the EP. The c...
www.rmweb.co.uk www.rmweb.co.uk
Click to expand...

Thanks Adrian, that’s well worth knowing: at least there is a work around this time (there wasn’t last time the site was rebuilt and the workbench thread I have was rendered more or less unusable - for my purposes - overnight).

That’s not a criticism exactly, as I know how complex these things are, especially at the kind of scale involved, and the catastrophic failure Andy has been dealing with here.

Adam
 
Kylestrome

Kylestrome

Active Member
Pencarrow said:
I think, given the circumstances that Andy Y outlines in the thread linked above, users are very lucky it's 'just' 12 months of photos missing.
Click to expand...
I wish it was 'only' from the last 12 months. Personally, I have lost numerous photos from my workbench & layout threads going right back to 2017. From a total of 400-odd uploaded pictures, there are around 100 left. I would have to re-upload a couple of hundred photos in order to restore everything and, although I have them backed up, I'm not not sure I can be bothered to spend hours putting them back.

David
 
NHY 581

NHY 581

Western Thunderer
Glad it's not just me Paul.

I saw this morning that a few of my photos from May last year had returned from the ether.

Standing by.
 
alastairq

alastairq

Western Thunderer
A Rmweb message on FAcebook, earlier on, informed us that the site would be down for routine maintenance by Invision. Now back up again, albeit minus the likes and grinnyfaces.
 
Pencarrow

Pencarrow

Western Thunderer
Kylestrome said:
I wish it was 'only' from the last 12 months. Personally, I have lost numerous photos from my workbench & layout threads going right back to 2017. From a total of 400-odd uploaded pictures, there are around 100 left. I would have to re-upload a couple of hundred photos in order to restore everything and, although I have them backed up, I'm not not sure I can be bothered to spend hours putting them back.

David
Click to expand...

It has been said on the forum that it will take time for the millions of images to reappear after indexing. My threads are slowly repopulating with more photos every time I look.
 
Kylestrome

Kylestrome

Active Member
Pencarrow said:
It has been said on the forum that it will take time for the millions of images to reappear after indexing. My threads are slowly repopulating with more photos every time I look.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the info. At the moment I have a problem with logging in, so I haven't the faintest idea what's happening.
 
Focalplane

Focalplane

Western Thunderer
Well, I left RMWeb in 2018 to join WT but have a link to my long-shelved Shipston-on-Stour 4mm layout. This no longer worked so I removed /community from the link and can now get access but that's about it.

To be honest, the blog seems very "clunky". As I have all the photos I don't think I will bother to try to reinstate the "story".
 
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