A sad story...
by Cesare on Tue Dec 18, 2007 2:43 pm

Since new travels fast, and gets changed each time the story is told: Here's the original version.

The server of banlist.nl was sponsored. The project grew so big I couldn't host it on my own servers any more.

For years, scripts on the server made sure backups were made very night, and rotated between daily, weekly and monthly versions. Each backup was sent to a mirror server, which stored those same rotated versions. That mirror server was made ready for a reinstall last week, wiping all data from it.

Friday, I got an ICQ-message from our sponsor, out of the blue: "hi, I just wanted to tell you, that we have to shut down the server by Monday". Replies to that message stayed unanswered. Afterwards he claimed to have send me more messages, yet my history showed no messages since July.

Sunday I got a message from a friend: the server wasn't responding any more. Contacting the sponsor, I found out he had taken down the server, reformatted it and installed Windows 2003 on it. That destroyed all data and backups on that server. The timing of that happening in the same week the mirror-server was cleaned, was immaculate.

Trying to recover the deleted files from the mirror-server was a pretty depressing journey. Using an ext3-filesystem it got more and more clear every minute that deleting files from that pretty much kills them beyond repair. Inodes get zeroed and even if you'd search the entire harddisk for files, the larger the file would be, the smaller the chance of restoring it successfully. The backups I was looking for, were several gigabytes.

Searching for other backups on other locations was just as depressing. Nor Me, Heftig or even the previous host had a backup more recent then May 3rd...

So here we are... Looking at the restored backup from 7 months ago...

...

Bans are stored in the client locally, they will be uploaded to the central database automatically. Except for the accounts created in the last 7 months.
For those of you who created an account in the last 7 months, you will have to sign up for a new one, after which the bans can be uploaded.

The forum will stay on this server (my own), but for the banlist.nl-project itself, we'll have to find a new host/sponsor.

Server (minimal) Requirements:
- Dedicated;
- Dual or Quad Processor 2GHz
- 4 Gb RAM (8 preferred)
- Debian installed, root-access.

Bandwith Requirements:
The full project (banlist.nl + XML hosting) took an average of 8Mbit/sec over the last few months, roughly extrapolated: 20Tb per month (give or take a few).
If we strip down to only banlist.nl-hosting and find a way to scatter the XML's over various servers that traffic can be brought back by a lot though (not sure how much).


If anybody out there is able to supply such a server and bandwidth, contact me:
IRC: #banlist @ QuakeNet
ICQ: 1553115
MSN: cesare_nl@hotmail.com
Mail: cesare@banlist.nlCesare
Site Admin


Posts: 320
Joined: Mon Jan 26, 2004 2:26 pm
Location: The Netherlands
WebsiteICQ