Hi, I've brought the forums back online, we'll see how things go. I'd originally intended to move them to a larger "drive" on the same server, but I failed with that several times. The operating system has a lot of security features enabled, and it requires me to learn a lot that is not part of my daily or even monthly job -- and still didn't succeed. Another option was moving to a new server (setting up something new vs moving within a server). That is what will happen ultimately, but it requires a lot of back-and-forthing with University IT on firewalls, network permissions, etc. That needs to be planned with whatever other work I have scheduled. So, the solution was to reconfigure the database so that it wasn't using up so much space. It was set up so that it would constantly use hard drive space and not give any up, even if the info was deleted or temporary. It now should keep itself cleaned out, and hopefully this will work for the short- to medium-term, until I can do the new server thing. 3 minutes back up, and there's a robot spam account... back to whack-a-spammer.
So, clearly what I thought would be a medium-term solution is only good for a bunch of short-term solutions as I need to do this new process every few weeks in order to flush out stuff. I was away last week when this was down, I did check the drive size before I left and thought it would be fine. Anyway, I'm around now for the next few months, so any future outages shouldn't be longer than a weekend if it were to happen then. And I'll prioritize the long-term solution.
Thanks, Daniel. The VCBF is considering putting on a walk to view leaf colours on ornamental cherries. It sure helped to be able to send people the link to the thread where we've posted some of these, to get an idea of the timing.
