What happened ?

[admin]

Firstly I would like to apologise to all Austech members for what has been our biggest downtime ever.

Our server suffered hardware failure and our attempts to get our host to move quickly and replace it didnt get us anywhere quickly. A summarry of this is here http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=658500

Our server backup on disc is corrupted and the hard drives from the server have been purchased by us and are in transit to us. They will then be sent to a forensic data recovery centre in Australia to 1.) Remove our database and 2) conduct testing on them as to what the problem has been. We are very confident of recovering our data ( a 90+% success rate and we have it on multiple drives ). Our host was not helpful at all in this regard.

Some of you may have seen various idiots claimed to have hacked our server. We do not believe this to be the case as a certain individual claimed that he hacked us when we had our last outage. The last outage was in fact caused by me.......I accidently changed the server firewall settings to block all internet connections. His current claims do not match up with what has happened he simply claims he hacks us every time we have a problem. Our external server monitoring shows no signs of any excess traffic , flooding or DOS attacks.

Our previous uptime on our US based server was excellent and we rarely had a problem. Since changing hosts we have had numerous problems.

PLEASE READ THIS CAREFULLY !!!!!!!!

As it stands we have had to reinstall and recreate Austech from scratch otherwise we would be down for weeks which isnt acceptable to anyone.

I would ask everyone to re-register their EXACT usernames with the EXACT email address that they had prior to the server problem. If possible use the same password.

It is our intention to merge the original database with what will be current postings in several weeks time. We would ask that in the meantime that you post as normal. Yes it does look empty and will look empty for probably 2-4 weeks we cannot give an exact timeframe for this.

Obviously the forum will not be searchable for archived posts in this time.

A number of individuals have gone out of their way to cause as much trouble as possible for Austech at a very difficult time. Slander , lies , innuendo , threats and all sorts of rubbish have been posted all over the internet by a number of individuals. Some are current members some are banned members. They will all now be banned members as I am not going to tolerate some of the things by people that have been tolerated in the past. What they have against me I dont know it seems that anyone that owns this site has to put up with there idiocy.

To these people if you dont like the site dont come here. There are some people out there with some serious problems who just cant seem to handle that they are not welcome here. Austech is essentially a technology site and people that want to run their own agendas and cause trouble for us are not welcome. This is something these people are going to find out. If they want to engage in gossip and slander they can do it elsewhere as they can kiss their access here goodbye permanently.

To the people that sent messages of support I sincerely thank you very much. It was a very much overwhelming situation and frustration isnt a word that comes close to covering it. Receiving emails from members showing their support made me work even harder to get this resolved in what has been a difficult period ( its hard to enjoy christmas and new year with this hanging over your head ).

So to summarize once again :

Register your exact former username with the exact same email address and preferably password.

Please post as normal and if anything post more ! We are not likely to have our database back on here and merged with new material for 2-4 weeks.
Please note we DO accept links to third party file sites such as Rapidshare etc and encourage the use of them for any files as the files do not reside on this server.

There will be plenty of things that dont work. A seperate thread will follow and I would ask that members post any faults as we will be constantly adding missing features etc day and night. We will delete your post if we resolve the issue. If you have any banners or logos in your browsers cache we would also appreciate them as it saves us a lot of time.

We only have a couple of paid advertisers and will endeavour to get their banners up as soon as possible. We will of course extend their advertising periods as compensation. Most of our adverts are served by Google ads and we have no commitments in that regard.

To finish , I would once again like to apologise as it is my fault that we wont have a database to install for 2-4 weeks. I have humanly done everything possible to minimise the downtime and we have opened the forum in a bare bones form to allow members to contact each other via the PM system especially those that had buying and selling transactions. I would also like to thank a few people for their help without it I probably would have given up and closed the site due to the mess. I would like to thank Andrew who did his best to try and deal with leaseweb for me. I would also like to thank cwispy for an offer of asistance and the approximetley 30 members who emailed their support.

Austech is not going anywhere and is here for the long haul no matter who dislikes the site from individuals to multinational companies.

Please do not ask for anymore information on this matter than what has been provided as we wont be giving any out. As I mentioned earlier a number of people are doing their best to cause us trouble and I wont be providing them any information to use against us. Andrew warned me about what I was in for and I didnt expect it to be as bad as he said. Its for this reason I dont reguarly post on the site

This thread will be closed as replies will take up time that needs to be spent working so I thank you all for your patience. A site is only as good as its members and as ar as I am concerned we have the best out there

If you really need to contact us , contact support@austech.info though please do not expect a fast reply

Thanks all
Paul