Whether it was funny or not, it’s hard to argue that it was in bad taste. However, it is good news that Meph – as well as the TehConnection site – is, in fact, alive and well.The following is the announcement which is currently shown on TehConnection’s homepage:
Welcome back to TC! We’re back, with absolutely 0 (that’s right, ZERO) data loss, other than some time. Before I get into that, though, I want to dispel some rumors.
1) We did *not* buy IMDB and IMDB did not buy us; no one will ever buy or sell our site. We merely redirected our DNS so that we could work on the site without having to worry about people poking in. IMDB is a massive, corporate-funded venture and this is the exact sort of thing that our very existence was built in protest against. While we do meet our montly donation goals (you guys), rest assured that no staff will ever pocket a single dollar from this site, let alone use it for some kind of venture purchase. Money from TC is only ever re-invested in TC.
2) We did not sell ourselves to Demonoid. Let me reiterate, no one will ever buy or sell TehConnection.
3) Rumors of my demise are greatly exaggerated. While that joke may not have been in the best taste, we figured that some lighthearted humor would do everyone well. There was no point at which we thought any of this would be taken seriously, so I apologize on behalf of TC staff. But really, some context goes a long way and I think we can definitely say that p2p gossip spreads wild and spreads fast and perhaps a little thought about what we believe wouldn’t be amiss.
If there are any rumors I missed, please bring them up in the forums.
Now, about what happened with the server. The we server have at the moment – Coppolla, for those who remember when we switched – is not RAIDed, because we cannot afford the cost of the array. Instead, we have two drives, one of which is dedicated to long term backups, both of code and of the database. There are some other things that the drive did that were essential to the operation of the site (which is why invites and IMDB fetching haven’t been working, come to find out), so when it finally gave up the ghost, the entire box did. Luckily we didn’t lose anything that couldn’t be replaced; even the backups existed elsewhere (there are a few offsite backup storages, funded entirely out of pocket by a few staff members). For those of you who may have taken this opportunity to worry about our backup strategy, we keep a rotating hourly backup snapshot of the source code and torrent files. 48 hours are rotated and one per day is kept in long term storage. As well as the source code and torrent file backups, we keep rotating daily mysqldump backups, as well as xtrabackup based backups. We keep the latest 14 days of those and one weekly goes into long term storage. This strategy has served us well in the past, and will continue to serve us well in the future. Luckily, however, because it was only the backup drive that failed, we were able to replace it and simply boot from the primary drive. We will not be another movie site that wastes hundreds of hours of people lives losing data. I take TC data more seriously and keep it more precious than I do my own data, or the data I’m responsible for work. Rest assured that TC is not going anywhere any time soon and certainly not because of techical incompetence on the part of the staff.
Once again, welcome back to TC,
–meph
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