SoFurry faces a day's downtime as brownouts corrupt metadata
Furry art and story community SoFurry is offline after a series of brownouts corrupted the database containing information about site activity. Repairs may take over 24 hours.
While power has now been restored, the interruption caused damage to the database holding data about submissions, comments and users, which must now be fixed:
SoFurry is experiencing extended downtime. We are working on data recovery after a particularly nasty set of circumstances after a brownout caused data corruption. Submission content is safe, however we have to repair the metadata db. We expect SF to be down for at least another 24 hours.
Update (18 Apr): SoFurry is back online, although occasional downtime is reported.
Update 2 (19 Apr): Additional servers are being added after further downtime.
Most database systems use transaction logs to ensure data integrity even in the face of a sudden crash. However, replaying these transactions can take significant time; transient hardware failure may also cause damage to the underlying filesystems.
SoFurry also briefly fell prey to a distributed denial of service attack earlier this month.
About the author
GreenReaper (Laurence Parry) — read stories — contact (login required)a developer, editor and Kai Norn from London, United Kingdom, interested in wikis and computers
Small fuzzy creature who likes cheese & carrots. Founder of WikiFur, lead admin of Inkbunny, and Editor-in-Chief of Flayrah.
Comments
Furtopia also seems to be down (as of Sunday, April 17th). Could it have also fallen prey to brown outs or ddos attacks?
Perhaps, or maybe just excessive traffic from people thinking it's what Zootopia is called. Edit: But it's up now.
Thanks for the updates!
Being not an IT guy, may want to explain what a brown out is, because while it's supposed to convey that the site is down, the only thing that comes to mind is that South Park episode with Cartman trying to find a special note on a recorder.
It's like a blackout, but brown. It's not an IT-specific term.
So favourites, comments etc made during the issues are okay? I was using it when it was sometimes reachable and sometimes not.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
Without knowing the full situation, it's impossible to say. If they're able to repair what was there, then probably, at least up to the most recent checkpoint. If they have to restore from backup, it'll be when the backup was taken. Or if they have replication set up, they could failover to that, but if so they'd probably have done that by now.
Oh they have checkpoints like Crash Bandicoot! Urbuga!
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