Hey all,
So as you may have noticed the site went down and came back up not 100%. I'm going to be getting deep into the technical weeds here, but the TLDR is:
TLDR; Domain expired and we didn't have any notification it was expiring because of how the site has changed hands over the years. We tried setting up a secondary domain, and the administrative tool... helpfully removed the old site contents, and we had to dig up an 11 year old backup because the backups we *thought* were happening, weren't.
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Now that we have the TLDR out of the way, you'll have noticed you started getting the NXDOMAIN error as DNS servers started clearing the domain out their cache. This basically stands for "Non-existant domain". The domain expired, was removed, and DNS servers started removing the domain. Sometimes it may work, other times fail. All luck of the draw generally.
So, once we figured out it was the domain expiring, we started looking into getting it back and that was and exercise in frustration. So, we grabbed the secondary domain "dokuga.org" and started looking at putting it in place.
I added that domain as a virtual host through the Web host administrative tools, but how it set it up was... really bad. So it was deleted, and was just going to be setup by hand instead of doing the "right" way. That deletion had the side effect of deleting the web root from the *other* virtual host we weren't touching.
So, great, the web root was deleted. They've been doing weekly backups of the web root, so at most a week of Art would be lost. I go to grab a backup, and find nothing. So I stare at this empty space... and keep staring. At this point, brick walls were searched for as a good place to slam heads into.
There's a stack of DVD's behind me. A moon or two ago I pulled an old backup off. This being a last ditch effort to salvage anything from the site. The backup was from a web root from Feb 13, 2010 (backup made May 26, 2010).
This is a slightly older structure, but it _seems_ to be able to read the *current* stories from the database okay, and the forum. Art was stored in the webroot, Spark archive is a sliver of its former self.
And this is where we find our self right now. :/
-M