IPDB Down

[mwong168]

Hello friends,

Starting April 8, the IPDB has been down, almost continuously, due to unexpected hardware problems. This could last for several days.

It will likely be completely down until the new system is up. If anyone finds it up, we don't know how long it will be up and it could disappear at any time. It crashes regularly, anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours after it has restarted.

Because we receive emails every day from our users, I am concerned that any emails sent to me/us on April 8 (and later) may have become irretrievable by us and the sender would never know and neither would we. Wolf says your emails to us bounce to let you know we did not receive them. If no bounce message, then during moments of uptime and if I am online then I should see the emails that arrived and may be able to hurriedly email you a reply before the site goes down.

If you have submitted images and information to us since April 8 via our online Submission Tool, it should still be there for us to see once things stabilize. You can always verify this by clicking on our [Settings] link to view a list of all of your unprocessed submissions in the right-side column of the Settings page, but, as always, it will list only the submissions where you have included your email address in the box provided for it, in the submission.

Wolf and I apologize for this problem and he wants you to know that he is trying to get the site up asap.

I will post here again when the problem is deemed as fixed.

Thank you,

Jay
IPDB

 

[mwong168]

Hi again,

I told you I would get back to you.

I spoke with Wolf tonight. Our website is now fully transferred over to the new server at Pair Networks, which is a highly reliable service, so we should not experience any more downtime, now or ever.

Prior to our local server failure, only our images had been on Pair, for about six years, but now everything is.

What is still inoperative is our online Submission Tool to allow you to submit images and text to us. Therefore, you may notice that the link [Submit Changes] is missing from each listing. I cannot process any submissions in queue for now. When this feature is fully tested and ready, we will turn it on and I will post here again to advise you of this. We look for another two weeks out on that.

Transferring my IPDB email account from old server to new server has been its own task with a lower priority, so that is why no one who was in communication with me when our server failed has heard from me via email since then. This transfer is going on as I write this. Almost all of my emails are saved in our archives, so I have probably 100,000 email records to transfer. I look to be back in business in a day or two, barring unforeseen glitches, except we will have 80 degree weather tomorrow before the rains return so you still may not hear from me! Thank you for your patience if you wondered why I suddenly ghosted you. You can still email me/us during this time.

The IPDB is/was backed up on the cloud prior to server failure and we see no loss of data. We thank those of you who have contacted us to offer your hosting services and I *think* I had replied to each of you individually, but if I missed anybody I am sorry and please know we are fine and I think we knew we would be. Wolf and I thank all of you who have expressed your concern, appreciation, and support for our website. It always feels good to know you are appreciated.

I look to post here again to tell you when our Submission Tool is online and that the IPDB is 100% operational.

Thank you,

Jay
IPDB