ReefCentral #fail

Interesting morning in aquarium board land.  ReefCentral is down and likely down for good.  Their database  Glassboxdesign has been doing excellent coverage of the events on their blog.

ReefCentral Gone For Good? and Was ReefCentral hacked? will get you up to speed.

Here’s the money shot:

First, I would like to apologize to all of our members, sponsors and even our staff. We had a breach in our security systems, allowing easy access [by a hacker] to our very important files and database. Most of these items were either corrupted or completely deleted. We made the mistake of placing our back ups on the same server as which we operated the site on (yes, we know, a HUGE mistake).

As for our sponsors, as per our agreement [very similar to user agreement] in the event that something like this happens, unfortunately this is a issue and loss we must share. All sponsors who have paid up until down time will not be refunded. If you have yet to send your sponsorship dues, please do not, as once it is sent we cannot refund it. If you are setup on a subscription basis, please cancel subscriptions as soon as possible.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me and I will be more than happy to assist you as best as possible.

Once again, I would like to apologize for everything to everyone. Like BeerGuy has already stated, website will be updated with more information regarding the situation that has shut us down.

-mhurley

There’s a lot of discussion on Twitter and I think that NanoReefBlog sums it up best:

Yeah, I agree, the amount of valuable info lost to the hobby is the worst part of the RC disaster.

Some of the information is available via Google cache.  It’s easy to do a search by site, then hit the cached link.

So, if you want to search for something like “yellow tang ich”, type “site:reefcentral.com yellow tang ich” into Google, then hit the cached link and you’ll get something like this.

It’s not perfect and will likely be missing most of the pictures, but it’s something.  All that information isn’t gone, it’s resting.  Get it while it lasts, I’m not sure how long Google will keep that data cached.

Also, as glassboxdesign pointed out, there’s also the wayback machine, but it only has information up to 2007.

I’m going to go double check the database backup procedure for frag’d it.

Update

The whole thing is turning  out to be one big hoax?  That’s a big WTF.

To the folks spreading rumors and making up quotes, it’s pretty sad when you have to resort to lying to try and get members.

The truth is that during an upgrade to mySQL we encountered an error that needed to be corrected. Unlike most sites, our database is very large and routine checks can take quite a long time to run. That’s one of the reasons why we’re one of the few sites that runs a full nightly backup. We’ll be back this morning with virtually zero data loss. Sorry to disappoint the folks forging the emails.

The phrase ‘virtually zero data loss’ is interesting.

Update x2

Here is what the BeerGuy said on RC in regards to this event:

Regardless of what rumor you’ve heard, we’re still here. We still have our database and we weren’t hacked.

If you’ve been paying attention to some of the talk about the board, we’ve been planning an upgrade for some time. On our archive site, the work is already complete and that has been our test site.

Yesterday, as a preliminary step to the upgrade, we upgraded our database software. The update fleshed out some table inconsistencies that the previous software version overlooked. Once those issues were resolved we had to update some SQL code because of a change in the way that some statements were being parsed by the new version.

Right now Searching has been disabled because that table is very large and it impeded checks that needed to be run. It’ll be returned to service as soon as things stabilize.

Thanks

Not a cool practical joke!