Recent lengthy downtime

[NFG]

So you may have noticed the forum (and the rest of the NFG empire) was offline for a couple of weeks. There's a hopeless and pathetic story behind it, but the short version is: it's up again and no data was lost.

The longer version:

The server is in Japan, which is not where I live most of the time (that'd be Australia). I'm in Japan now, and as a surprising coincidence the server's fibre modem smoked and died while we were on the plane over. Unfortunately I was in another city and had to diagnose it remotely. The ISP was contacted and a tech was sent and the modem replaced! Hurrah!  This was about day 3 after the failure...

And then while remotely connecting to the server it dropped out and stayed dropped out.

I've just gotten back to town and checked it over and there's a cute little message in the error logs:

"An error was detected in the IPv4 stream and all IP traffic has been shut down. Haha suck it, user. "

I'm paraphrasing but that's basically what happened. No hacks, no corruption, no data loss, just a loss of access.

To reassure everyone, a bit of detail about the server: 15 years of almost uninterrupted service! On a Windows box!  The last 11 years it's been a continent away and basically hasn't so much as sneezed. Every night all the important things are backed up and sent to Australia where a backup box waits ready, and haha funny story, that whole network dropped offline while I was here in Japan too.  So I couldn't launch the backup!  The perfect storm or haha fuck you, user. I dunno.

Anyway.

To remedy the situation I'm reversing the servers: the primary box to Australia where it'll be closer to me most of the time,  and a backup system in Japan. Look forward to a day or two of downtime next weekend as well as I fly back to aus with the server clutched to my chest.

Sorry for the downtime!

You can follow @nfg on twitter if you want to be bored all the time and occasionally get server status reports. =)

[Link83]

Thanks Lawrence, happy to see the site is back up
I was beginning to think something more serious had happened, and was worried that it might not return.