First of all, one of two DB servers which have been giving us hell since we bought them (only two servers were bought from that company, and we never went back) has died completely with harddrive errors. Annoying. Brad is attempting to fix it and return it soon.
Also, machines have been crashing due to a linux driver problem with eepro100 cards. We have started switching to the e100 driver instead in hopes that it will stop the crashes.
There are a lot of people who are insisting that we are dumbasses who missconfigured NTPd (Network Time Protocol) and ended up with the fun which happened yesterday.
To clear some quick things up, this is not true. The date on all of the servers was correct.
It looks like they got set back to 1999 in most e-mails, but this is not the case. Some people had their account set to expire in 2000, or not at all. Something set the paiduntil data back exactly three years for all paid accounts. It only modified the year, the day and month stayed intact.
The hardware failure I mentioned above happened right around the time this problem occurred.
Also, all of this fraud/scam/blah crap is childish, to say the least. None of the admins were even around when it happened. Brad was really quite and very asleep. I was in north smithfield, rhode island (which is about half an hour from my home in massachusetts) watching ghost busters on HBO with some friends. When I came home (at around 5am), someone informed me that all paid accounts were expired. I took a quick look to confirm, then shut the whole site down, stopped the DBs, and rose brad from the dead. For a while, I thought I wasn't going to have a job anymore. Reality quickly set in and reminded me that backups exist for a reason, which we then used to restore the lost data.
If we were scamming people, I would be able to afford health insurance. Which I can't. Those of us who do work here do so because we love the site. There is (really) no money involved at this point. Maybe sometime in the future we can have living wages, but not now.
Back to coding...