June website problems, missing dates

[Tom Humphrey]

I'm sorry for all the problems with the website over the past month and for the lack of any updates from me about the problems. In general I have not paid enough attention to problems with the project recently. Thank you to everyone who has persevered with the project despite what must have been a very frustrating litany of failures.

The site was intermittently off-line numerous times during June. This was mostly due to hardware problems with the web server - a harddisk was beginning to fail and had become very unreliable - the disk is now replaced and the computer is now working reliably again. Another disruption was due to electrical work going on which caused some intermittent disruptions for a day. Finally having changed the disk I thought it was a good chance to upgrade the operating system - this appeared to go smoothly, but as it turned out I overlooked a database problem that was triggered by the update. Critically, following the upgrade, specimen collection dates were no-longer recorded correctly.

Missing collection dates
All sheets documented or edited between 20th and 30th June (~469 specimens) will currently be missing collection dates due to the database error. The system is now working correctly again.

The missing data is not lost and I will be able to retrieve it from the log files, however repairing the records will take a bit of time. Meanwhile, please don't spend time adding back the missing dates yourself - I will be able to effect an automated repair for the vast majority of affected records and will manually correct the remainder.


I've got quite a backlog of email about the project which I'll respond to individually, thank you to everyone who tried to notify me of the problems. From now on I shall try to plan my time better so that herb@home gets all the attention it deserves.

regards,

Tom