Prohashing Mining Pool Forums

Hi Everyone,

Yesterday, our forums went offline due to corruption in the forums database. I attempted to repair the corruption, but I was unsuccessful and had to restore from a December 30 backup. We run the forums on a completely separate database and server from the mining pool, so there is no chance of anything in the mining pool being affected.

I will be working throughout the day to restore posts that were created since December 30. If you created a forums user account since December 30, you will need to recreate your account. The forums should otherwise be working normally. If you have any issues, please let me know.

We aren't sure what caused the problem, even though we were able to recover the data. Therefore, the forums might go offline again if whatever caused the problem the first time happens again.

While the mining server database has continual backups and can be restored to any point in time, the forums server is not backed up on the same schedule because the data is less important. Chris will increase the backup frequency so that less time is required for recovery. He'll also upgrade to the latest version of phpBB in case there is some sort of bug that was resolved, and he plans to change from mySQL to Postgres for the forums, so that the more reliable Postgres is used across the entire system.

I'm glad to note that this issue has been completed.

Chris decided not to upgrade the forums to the latest version of phpBB, because it doesn't have good template support yet. He'll upgrade later, as soon as more templates are available.

He also changed mySQL security settings, so that if any bugs caused by bad queries in the software occur in the future, the queries will simply be rejected. Finally, he made it so that forums are backed up more frequently. While they won't have continuous backups like the mining server will, the daily backups will be an improvement over the previous monthly schedule.