Major Server Problems

[Ben]

I'm sure many noticed the forum and AF.net being down for over 3 days. There was a major server faliure, and isn't really 100% back online, but hopefully it will stay up long enough to get things moved over to a new server. I'll make an announcement when all is officially clear.

Ben

[Ben]

Well, after more than a week of all my sites being down, it seems they may fiannly be properly back up. I"m so sorry to have had to do this to you all! It's not my fault, but I'm still sorry

Here is the officialy release from my hosting company:

Dear respective customer,
First of all, please accept our sincere apology in regards to the on-going outage which you have been experiencing regarding either you web site (located on web5), your mail service (located on mail5), or your database service (located on mysql5). We truly hope that you would be able to understand our tough situation and decide to continue your services with us.


Box web5.worldispnetwork.com which is also running a mail server (mail5), and a database server (mysql5), was subjected to a Federal Search Warrant (SW) issued by the Northern District of California which were relating to one particular client's website under investigation by the Federal Government. This is not the first time this kind of incident happened to our company. We understand that our high ranking pages in major search engines tends to attract out laws to host their illegal website which support their illegal activities within our network. We have taken various effort to keep them away by putting a very strict accounts creation policy. We cross check every new signups against many procedures to keep these people away from our network, nevertheless one of them has slipped our screening process and managed to host their illegal website within our network.


The authorities has taken the entire server as an evidence to do further investigations with the server. We were clearly instructed to "make an excuse" of hardware failure so that the client which were under investigation would not suspect that the authorities has their entire data for evidence. We are not allowed to rebuild the server to a new machine using our backup data until they have finished their entire investigation and paperwork process.


That is the bad news, the good news is we have been notified a couple of hours ago through a facsimile and a phone call, that the investigation process has been concluded. This allows us to rebuild the server to a new machine while they keep the original data and equipments. We are in the process of rebuilding it to a new machine now. The Operating System restoration has been completed, we are now in the process of restoring all databases, websites, and mails back to the new box. All services within that box will be restored within approximately 3 hours from the time of this notification.


Again, please do accept our apology for not being able to notify you as the customer with the "true fact". But we had to do what was instructed. We do hope you understand and continue your services with us. Please contact our billing department for compensation request of this outage.


We thank you again for your on going trust to use our services!

The Management