The Recent Downtime, Lessons About Backups, and the status of Camlorn_audio

Firstly, I can definitely set up a web server in less than half the time it took to do it the first time. Secondly, the reason I know this is because I am now on a different VPS.

So, what happened. Apparently, the VPS control panel used by Chicago VPS, Solus, had a vulnerability. A major one. Someone got high level access to the Atlanta node and began downloading all the databases, deleting as they went.

This, in and of itself, isn't bad. What is bad is that it took Chicago VPS 2 days to even get my VPS back to me, and they couldn't restore from backups. Apparently, restoring from backups takes manpower. Apparently, it takes enough manpower that one person is evidently not enough. Apparently, this is so much manpower that it is possible to not have enough people on staff to actually do it.

Not only did it take two days to get me a VPS again, the control panel is still down and said VPS is wiped clean. Ironically enough, my bill was due this Sunday. I've cancelled my account and moved to Bhost, which I've heard all sorts of good things about. Hopefully this won't happen again. I don't have the three announcements they posted, but it was clear from the wording that Chicago VPS wasn't prepared for this eventuality.

As a consequence of all this, I am going to begin weekly backups as soon as possible. I wasn't doing this before. Obviously, I will be in future. It wouldn't have helped much; I also need a weekly database dump for wordpress. I will be doing this as well. Once I've formulated a pair of backup scripts, I'll post them here with directions--backing up a Linux VPS to Windows has some peculiarities and oddities.

There are in fact about 5 missing blog posts, and I'm not going to take the time to type them over from Google cache.

In brighter news, Camlorn_audio is now over on Bitbucket. This may have some accessibility issues, and if it does I'll take the time to move it back to my personal server. Having your Git repository go down with your web site is not conducive to getting work done. Since I've never heard of Bitbucket being taken down for 4 days via a hack, I think it will ultimately be a better solution. That, and I can get an issue tracker and a wiki by just checking a box. The link from here to there will be up sometime soon.

And the brightest news: the reason I found out my web site was down is because I was going to make a nice and lengthy post about Camlorn_audio, how it's useable, and how close I am to some sort of release. Said post was going to include all sorts of stuff about how you can build it yourself if you want. I could release a compiled version, but I want Streaming and EFX support before I do so. I intend to implement those two features, document it, and release 1.0 soonish. I'll write said detailed post later, but that's where it stands in a nutshell.