AVSForum suffers database failure, loses "tens of thousands" of posts

by Darren Murph, posted Aug 11th 2008 at 1:58PM

Generally speaking, we don't much cover forums 'round these parts, but the AV Science Forum -- better known as AVSForum -- is the place to go to converse about all things AV-related. In what can only be described as a dramatic bummer, the website suffered a "a major failure in the database and backup storage." Due to the catastrophe, "tens of thousands" of posts were lost over the past week, and the boards have been restored to how they looked on August 2nd, 2008. We get this weird feeling the administrators will be implementing enough backup solutions to keep things humming along 'til the end of time after having this happen, though.

[Thanks, Big Wizz]

Filed under: Industry, Misc

Tags: avsforum, down, outage, problem, site, website

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Neutral

Ron @ Aug 11th 2008 2:01PM

Wow...I cant say I will miss all the blu-ray vs HDDVD threads but so much useful info lost it will surely take some time to get it all posted again :( Every since the downhill slid at Home Theater Forum I only go to AVS anymore.

Neutral

amount @ Aug 11th 2008 2:48PM

It's only 9 days of posts...

Neutral

Dagwood @ Aug 11th 2008 2:16PM

they only lost a weeks worth of new posts. That is not so bad. At first I though the whole site was gone.

Neutral

john nemesh @ Aug 11th 2008 2:16PM

My guess is that the site buckled under the weight of all the whining laments and petitions of the HD-DVD fanboys, distraught over their "superior" format having lost the war!

Seriously, all credibility of that site was lost when they violated their supposedly "neutral" status to ban any pro Blu-Ray chatter...even from insiders!

No big loss if their whole site burned down IMHO.

Highly Ranked

TrentD @ Aug 11th 2008 2:44PM

The banned "pro-Blu-ray" chatter was mainly stuff like:

"HD-DUD is fur suckaz...Blue-RAE is da bomb".

There was an immense amount of disinformation, FUD, and personal attacks during the format war. If you think the only banned chatter was about Blu-ray, then you're sadly misinformed.

Nobody banned insiders either - what a ridiculous notion.

Highly Ranked

Joe T. @ Aug 11th 2008 2:48PM

Well then, no big loss if you stay away.

Neutral

TrentD @ Aug 11th 2008 2:59PM

John, you ought to be careful saying such things while posting under your real name. AVAD Northwest serves may not appreciate your derogatory comments, and your employer would surely be embarrassed to see such inflammatory remarks made about a product made by Toshiba, whose products your employer distributes.

Being in a sales position, I think you may want to choose your words more carefully in the future, or hide your identity better.

http://www.avadnw.com/contacts.cfm

Highly Ranked

Siva @ Aug 11th 2008 4:22PM

The AVS forum is huge. I learned about home theater acoustic treatments, projectors, receivers, etc. from that site and I am a big contributor with over 2300 posts. I have gotten personal thank yous from people I have helped. I have never received any such pleasure from other sites including engadget!

Highest Ranked

Spiza @ Aug 11th 2008 5:32PM

Siva, I would like to personally thank you for your post above.

Neutral

inteller @ Aug 11th 2008 3:32PM

well, i guess this will teach them not to back up to RAID0 devices from Office Depot anymore!

I would have thought such a sophisticated place like AVSForum would have had a sophisticated backup solution.

Highly Ranked

Alex @ Aug 11th 2008 3:36PM

wow as many idiots here as on the HD media forum at AVS. The lost threads are from the last month, not exactly a lot of BD vs HDDVD fanboy bs going on anymore. Learn to read.

Neutral

john nemesh @ Aug 11th 2008 4:24PM

No I have nothing to hide, and my post was not anti-Toshiba, it was anti-AVS Forums.

Highly Ranked

acidrock @ Aug 11th 2008 6:42PM

With AVSforum being such a useful resource for anyone interested in electronics, especially for those trying to learn, how can you expect any customer to take you as a salesman seriously? With the countless ignorant salespeople at retailers who know almost nothing about what they're selling AVS helps customers save time and money.

You come here and minimize AVS down to a blue vs red flame war when you couldn't be more wrong in your characterization. I can only assume you spouted off ignorance there as well and was either flamed or banned.

You're lack of understanding and close mindedness puts you right there with the other salespeople I tell people to avoid. I hope for the sake of your employer that not all his salespeople are so clueless.

Neutral

DEEZNUTZ @ Aug 12th 2008 10:15AM

John mesh, seriously, quit while you're behind.

Neutral

Mr. E @ Aug 11th 2008 5:04PM

I'm always a little bit surprised when something like this happens. I think a lot of people, administrators included, equate "redundancy" with "backup". Remember, just because you have your disks in a RAID configuration with redundancy (RAID 1, RAID 5, etc.), that does NOT mean you are in the clear as far as data protection. Controller failure, array corruption, a fire in the computer room, multiple drive failures... Any number of issues besides a single drive failure could still cause data loss, so regular backups with offsite rotation is the best bet for data protection.

Of course we don't know what exactly happened to AVSForum, but at least it can serve as a wake-up call to other administrators out there.

Neutral

why not the LS2LS7? @ Aug 12th 2008 2:12AM

Agreed. I have friends who tell me "I'm using a RAID array so I don't have to do backups". My response is "RAID doesn't protect against del *.*" And that's just the start of what you aren't protected against.

Neutral

DrXym @ Aug 11th 2008 6:42PM

At least it was only a week's loss of messages. An annoyance but not the end of the site. Important messages can probably be salvaged from Google cache if they're lucky.

Neutral

Bob Sintas @ Aug 11th 2008 7:06PM

From AVS Forum:

This is not normal at all as you can expect. The data being hurt after the upgrade was done was not seen. More or less some table corruption happened and when the table hit the 4.5GB default max from the new MySQL5 (we were using 4), well, it was not happy. When the REPAIR command was run on the table per MySQL instruction, it just dropped all the data from the start of the data issue on. That in itself it not normal.

Went to the backup from 30 mins prior, same issue. Went back one more day, same issue. Thus kept going until I hit the upgrade date and could then see the table issue, repair, and upgrade it again.

So, could it happen somewhere else. Sure. And it has. Thus the error ID and fix posted on the MySQL 5 site listed. But it is not normal.

All in all a loss to the community for sure.

Take care, keep safe.
__________________
David Bott
AVS Forum Admin
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showpost.php?p=14423924&postcount=7

Neutral

Jeebus @ Aug 15th 2008 3:51PM

When will people stop using the crap that is MySQL?

Neutral

JASON @ Aug 11th 2008 7:39PM

well they need to learn to do a site backup each night! simple!

Highly Ranked

DZ @ Aug 11th 2008 10:27PM

"Went to the backup from 30 mins prior, same issue. Went back one more day, same issue. Thus kept going until I hit the upgrade date and could then see the table issue, repair, and upgrade it again."

What about this did you not read???? 30 minutes... the previous day... the one before that... until he hit a backup that was a week back, before the upgrade. sheesh...

Neutral

dj496 @ Aug 11th 2008 8:17PM

Between all the forum RSS feeds and users' email thread subscriptions, all the data is there, but sadly not in one place ;(

Neutral

why not the LS2LS7? @ Aug 12th 2008 1:05AM

dbstalk.com is hosed too.

Neutral

Slocko @ Aug 12th 2008 12:53PM

The issue was that they upgraded the database to a newer version and something became corrupt. Unfortunately, the corruption was not visible until they hit the 4.5 gb default max. So since the upgrade they were backing up corrupt data and the problem didn't become apparent until a week later. By then the backups themselves were corrupt.

No way to foresee something like that. Only way would be to have a script that adds dummy records to a test database to see if any corruption shows when it hits the limit. This would be done before deployment to production.

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