OK, bring in the DB Techies

General 'Hibernian' forum for the entire cluster
Majty
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Post by Majty »

Vampiiress wrote:At one of my accounts, I cant log onto Rightnow, as it Say my user ID is invalid. I logged into my subscription page, and everything is as it should be. Both my user ID and My e-mail adress is correct, but still I cant log onto right now, and not even request new password, as it wont reconize my user ID. Other ppl I've talked to have other strange things happening when contacting Rightnow - such as recieving an email on their emailadress, but adressing someone else.

Check this article for the problem with your right now account, perhaps its a sollution for you if you have more than one account..

http://www.prydwen.net/showthread.php?t=4034
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Nedo
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Post by Nedo »

I once had a backup software telling me eeeevery morning that the backup had run smooth. No errors at all. Then found out when I needed teh backup itself that they were all corrupt on tape, I could not get 1 single file back from the DLT tapes. After that I do a faked recovery every now and then to verify the backups.....could be the case at GOA to I guess (with the vital difference that I had nothing important on the backups I thought I made ^^ )

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Post by Xest »

Killder wrote:This is not intended to be a whine at GOA - I have 3 characters stripped of all items but luckily had their templates stored so I am confident they will be fixed in time. I just cant get my head round why GOA are fixing the problems in this way.

For information I work as a professional DBA - I have been fixing database problems for more years than I can remember.

I read somewhere that the DAOC database is not a 'relational' database (such as Oracle, DB2, SQLServer etc.) but rather a 'flat-file' database of not specified origin. However, technically, the principles for this discussion should still apply.

I'll try to explain in less technical terms.....

When we 'relational' DBA's talk about a rollback, what we really mean is a restore and rollforward to a point in time prior to a problem occurring hence it appears as a rollback before the problem occurred.

Consider the scenario:

A problem occurred on a database at time 'X' which could not be fixed without implementing a 'rollback' (this could be hardware failure, software related, human error or any numerous reason).

What happens next is a full backup of the database (usually backups are taken daily/weekly and stored on a tape cartridge away from the actual database server) is loaded over the top of the faulty database thereby replacing it with an un-faulty albeit older version.

Then transactional logs which store all database transactions (these logging activities are occurring when you see the 'your character has been saved' message in game) between successful backups are re-applied to the older restored database until a point in time just before the problem occurred.

Hence if GOA have performed such a rollback, the only problems we should be encountering with our charactares is the loss of items/exp/money obtained in the period of time between the point in time of the rollback and the time the database was shutdown to perfoirm the rollback which according to GOA should be about half a day (Wednesday). I'm sure we would all prefer this scenario rather than thousands of RightNow submissions and trying to remember what is on our characters and vaults.

I would pose some questions with the current GOA solution:

(1) Did they have a problem with their tape backups? maybe they didn't have a valid backup that they could restore?
(2) Did the problem corrupting the database happen a long time ago and only an event more recent has caused the database to actually 'show' the corruptions? ie. they could not do a rollback because the period of data-loss would be unacceptable to all customers.
(3) Has a human-error occurred? eg. Haxxor or accidental GOA employee related?

All the above cases would need a manual data-cleanse which seems to be what is happening here and in business terms a DBA somewhere would be looking for a new job because of this.
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Kari
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Post by Kari »

Satyn wrote:tbh i dont understand whats so important about knowing the details about what went wrong. Things went wrong, apparently very serious and it should be sorted right now. Thats all I need to know.
Since this has happened people have been comparing the way GoA have dealt with the issue against how they themselves have to deal with problems in their industries - one of the first things I'm expected to demonstrate to the customer upon resolution of an error (serious or otherwise) is that the gap has been plugged, and the same issue wont occur again.

My own opinion not that it matters is that this issue has been snowballing for a while without being noticed, hence they cant just roll back to a decent version. How long that 'while' is, whether they know enough to identify a similar problem again, and whether Prydwen could be affected again (considering the shots of vamps in reinf, scrolls in armour slots etc) are questions we, as customers are all entitled to ask.
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Luz
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Post by Luz »

mysql? wow then hand me everything and I´ll fix it ^^ :tare:
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Finolin
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Post by Finolin »

Satyn wrote:tbh i dont understand whats so important about knowing the details about what went wrong. Things went wrong, apparently very serious and it should be sorted right now. Thats all I need to know.
It's not so much a matter of needing to know as wanting to know. Many of us with technical backgrounds or professions (or others still who just like to think they do) are having a hard time getting our heads around just why this 'solution' is the one GOA decided to use and more information might help restore our confidence in their systems.

Bad analogy - you've leased a car and you get it serviced by the company from whom you are leasing it. Then it stops working one day, so the company takes it in to service it. You get it back a week later but it has a funny noise in the engine. The company says they can't do anything about it. If you don't know anything about cars, you'll be annoyed but happy to have the car back. But if you're a mechanic, you'll be curious what the company did to fix it, and especially why there's still the funny noise, as maybe you've fixed cars before and managed to do so without the noise.

Basically we've been given back the server but with the obvious problem of missing items. Some of us want to know in more detail why that problem was left uncorrected. With GOA not telling us, it (further) reduces our confidence in how they run their systems.

That said, when I worked in e-commerce, we'd never release any sort of internal system details to anyone outside the company. As you said, no one needs to know, and if you release some information if just makes (some) people want to know more and more about how things work. So while I'd personally like to know what happened, I can see perfectly well why they are unlikely to share that information.
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Luz
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Post by Luz »

what keeps ringing in my head is :

they say they cant make a "rollback", but they say they can check if your claim for an item is valid very easy. does not compute.

edit : since only way they can check this 100% is in a backup ffs....
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Killder
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Post by Killder »

Another more obvious analogy would be:

What if your Bank or Building Society online accounts database had a problem?

Imagine the horror if they said - no problem, just log on, check your account details and if your balance is not what it should be, email us the details of how much is missing and we will correct it!

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Luz
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Post by Luz »

Killder wrote:Another more obvious analogy would be:

What if your Bank or Building Society online accounts database had a problem?

Imagine the horror if they said - no problem, just log on, check your account details and if your balance is not what it should be, email us the details of how much is missing and we will correct it!
hahaha o.0

I had 1 miljon, I just won.. I am serious man!
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Satyn
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Post by Satyn »

ppl been asking for details about the problem for the last 10 days i seriously doubt they'll give it now.
I wouldnt anyway, cos they obviously have a good reason not to.
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