UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.classic UBB.classic 6 Support Post Server Move Issues

To make a long story short; our UBB was moved in its entirety to a new hard drive (cgi and ubb dirs tarred), unpacked, and that's when problems started. When I hit the CP I set up the new paths and everything ok, and everything seemed to be ok. Then I tested the boards, and oops, any link I hit it threw me back to ultimatebb.cgi. Not good.

Since I've just moved the board around like this in the past and didn't have any problems (though we had PHP accel. off before), I didn't think there was anything particular to watch for. Well, after learning otherwise, I went and read the move guide, and I saw that the cache folder and vars_config.cgi should not be transferred. Ooops. (I cleaned the cache after the board was closed on the old server, I figured this deletes it entirely, but didn't check. It doesn't apparently.)

Well, I tried just deleting the cache dir after the fact, but new files kept spawning in even though the board was closed (I just had admin preview on). Well, once I logged off, this seems to have stopped, and I could delete the cache dir. I got rid of vars_config.cgi after that too.

So, once again, I go to the CP, set all paths, and everything seems to be ok - sort of. I didn't realize that the cookie info was stored in vars_config, so now that a new one was made, everyone had to login on the boards again (question: could this be avoided somehow, or is it unavoidable when moving the board? I didn't dare set the same cookie value into the cgi manually.)

Now the boards started behaving normally, people could post, etc. However, in the process, vars_config.inc.php was deleted by UBB apparently, because it suddenly just wasn't there any more, and UBB didn't recreate it either. We use this file for our modified version of the news hack. Question here: why didn't UBB recreate that file? I made it myself from the information now in the vars_config.cgi, and after a metadata rebuild the news started to work again too, but the question why it wasn't recreated remains.

Well, I guess this wasn't a short story after all. <img src="https://www.ubbcentral.com/boards/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" />
So, Charles, can you please answer my two questions in the text above (plus any comments you can offer), and tell me if everything is ok now, or if there is anything else I should be looking at to make sure the board is all ok.

To recreate vars_config.inc.php, I belive you need to go in and submit the Primary Settings of the board with the UBB Accelerator enabled. The UBB should do this whenever you submit that page. The vars_config.inc.php shouldn't just automagically disappear. If it keeps doing it, someone is probably deleting it.

Unfortunately, when you do the move instructions, it assign a new ubber id for the cookies. If you wanted to automagically accept their old cookie, you would need to write some script to read the old cookie, and set a new one. Generally, it is more efficient to just let them login again. Plus it is a good opportunity for you to possibly do a rules check or something <img src="https://www.ubbcentral.com/boards/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

BTW, nice usage of the ubbnews.php <img src="https://www.ubbcentral.com/boards/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Actually, I found out UBB did recreate it later, and overwrote the fixed one I put there with old paths... I'm not sure how exactly, but it took quite some time for us to figure it out. Weird.

The login thing was a problem only because half of the people couldn't remember their passwords (or couldn't retrieve them because of obsolete emails). Work for me to send it to them all...

As for ubbnews, thanks and thanks. <img src="https://www.ubbcentral.com/boards/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" />

God damn it... this is obviously still messed up. :/

Some of our users reported UBB giving them "out of space" errors when they tried to access one of the forums - but I and others could access it just fine? And there's a ton of free space left!

I noticed I left the UBB Accelerator off... so I turned it on now, and same bloody problem surfaced as before. Whichever link you clicked, it forwarded you to the front page of the boards. I shut it off again, but it still kept doing that. So I turned it off again and I'm running the entire metadata update in the hopes that this will finally fix everything. Gah.

If you are getting reports of out of space errors, then you need to contact your host. The UBB cannot lie about out of space. It only tells you what the Operating system is telling it.

No, trust me, it's wrong. I admin my own server, I know to the byte how much there is on it. It's got over 20GB left! :/

And as I said, this was showing up in only forum...

the bottom line is that UBB.classic does not test the server itself for space - it is simply handing back to you the message from the operating system. you can check your error logs for further information, but we can't help in this case. this is not a UBB error.

Well, the other problems I listed are, and I haven't recieved any official help with those either.

I'm guessing that once you fix this Out of Space error things should stabilize. I would first get that solved, then we'll go back to the other problems with the Accelerator.

Also, is it possible that you are running into a file limit, such as 10,000 files???

Ugh, there's a file limit of 10k files? I'd think we've passed that a long time ago. I mean, every thread has its own cgi, and I'm pretty sure we've been over that for years.

And what I found out now is that the file system is apparently corrupt. Somebody shoot me... I'll run fsck and go from there... Wish me luck.

I'm not saying there is on your server, but some webhosts limit the number of allowed files, and that sometimes causes Out of Space errors, IIRC.

Good luck with the file system problem, and see how it behaves after that. If you are still having Accelerator errors after the file system is fixed, c'mon back and we'll work on them or have you go to a support ticket <img src="https://www.ubbcentral.com/boards/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

A file limit would explain the behavior of the out of space condition - the UBB could be trying to create a new cache file in one forum, but has a cache file for the other. Dump the cache and see what happens.

I would suggest opening a support ticket for any remaining issues...

Dumped the cache repeatedly, didn't help... And no, I have no imposed file limits on the server. Our server host is running some hardware diagnostics so I have to wait for that to complete before I can proceed with anything.