My Lamma Forums

[Samson]

3 cheers for Gung and everyone else involved in getting our forums back on line!

[Lamma-Gung]

Anyone else? I wish! It's hard to get any help on all this technical stuff. This forum software (phpBB) is not supported by our hosting company, so I was on my own in this.

Two days of frustration and fiddling are finally over, most of it learning to do something I have never done before, troubleshooting and fixing a forum.

It was also such bad timing, the Santy computer worm went around the internet just in the days before Christmas when even techies and geeks are celebrating Christmas and tech support is minimal. It brought down tens of thousands of similar forums in a few days, most are still down and might remain down, as it's a lot of effort to fix each one and in many cases the virus wiped out the entire website, including all web pages.

When the attack happened, our hosting company basically shut down the entire website, forums and Blog and all and told me to fix it myself before they'd let us use the forums again... Being all friendly and giving some good basic advice, but basically it was "Not our problem!".

I don't want see a cryptic and totally useless PHP error messages like "Fatal error: Call to undefined function: attach_setup_basic_auth() in http:\\www.Lamma.com.hk\....\forum\includes\auth.php on line 111" again in a long time!

Many thanks to the phpBB tech support forums where several people got the same error message and gurus answered their messages quickly, so I didn't even need to post any message myself.

Well, it's up again, a few small details still need fixing, like the View Posts of the last x days at the top of this screen, but this shouldn't take much time.

Any problems remaining, please let me know, as i haven't tested everyhing yet. Attachments, for example...

[Guy MIller]

Well done

[Lamma-Gung]

Ah, just wanted to email you o test the attachments from a user perspective!
It only took you a few minutes to find out that the forums are up again! But Samson was even faster!

So you guys have been sitting on the PC all day long, checking every few minutes if it's back up & running again? Sorry for keeping you addicts waiting for so long!

[Insomniac]

Its funny how these viruses/worms seem to appear around the holidays... perhaps it gives the fucking useless IT departments something to do when they are out of the office and then 'fix' when they are in it. Job creation by and for geeks.

[Lamma-Gung]

I've been communicating with some these tech support people, thousands of them had to work through Christmas Eve, night and most of the holidays to stop this worm from spreading further and destroying even more websites... they might find your remarks extremely offensive.

Worms like these are usually released by some idiot, a bragging script kiddie, frustrated-by-real-life teenagers or young adults who've got nothing better to do than trying to inflict the most damage on the largest number of websites. It's the experienced, professional tech support people who are the line of defense from these nasty attacks, fixing the mess the viruses made and trying to prevent further attacks.

Even though, in our case they just shut down our entire site at first, investigated for a day. Then told me that they're not supporting our forum software and they'll only let us use it again I'll upgrade to the worm-resistant latest version myself.

With all the add-ons and "modifications" on our board, to be re-nstalled after the quite straight-forward upgrade this took me almost a full day of very techie PHP code changes, not something I enjoy doing on a Unix system at all.

Anybody found any problems, anything not working anymore or working differently now? I'm aware of the main forum index pages problems at the top (no more 5 popular topics table and the recent-posts drop-down menu).