[Alex Pepple]

Dear Eratosphereans,

I’d hoped you won’t have to endure another outage, or me having to do a rescue jog and post more of the same here … But, most of you must have noticed earlier today the site was essentially dead and only showed an error message of:

“Database Error Database error
The database has encountered a problem …..”

It turned out to be a DOS (denial of service) attack! And I’m thinking, since I made it tough for them to break in, they're instead going to flood the site with request to the point of overwhelming it so it can't be useful to anyone else, and that’s essentially what was happening. The database was getting an onslaught of requests, and it went from reporting “too many connections” to getting corrupted to broken and inoperative (when I checked the logs to determine the problem).

The long and short is that it took a lot of time and a lot of doing, but I’ve managed to restore it back to full health (without having to resort to replacing it with a backup copy, which would have resulted in hours to days of data loss). Indeed, there should be no data loss this time.

Thank you all for your support and patience … Onward and carry on!

Cheers,
…Alex