[AG-TECH] Disappearing venue definitions?

[Christoph Willing]

On Tue, 2004-01-13 at 12:31, Randy Groves wrote:
> Has anyone else had this happen?  I've been running an AG 2.x Venue server 
> for some time now.  I left it up over the holidays, but didn't actually 
> check on whether it was responsive or not.  When I returned, I just assumed 
> that it had gone to sleep, although it was still running (the BridgeServer 
> was also up), so I restarted both.
> 
> Lo and behold, when I attempted to connect to my venues, I find that they 
> had all disappeared!  The venue server was back to it's default initial 
> state.  There was no 'backup' in the VenueServer.dat.bak file - it was 
> identical to the main .dat file.
> 
> This has happened before, and those times, I figured it was something that 
> I had done in fiddling with the configuration.  But definitely NOT this 
> time.  There is nothing that is obvious in the logs.
> 
> While my venue server is not enormous, re-entering is not a huge pain, but 
> a pain, nevertheless.
> 
> But this points up a fairly significant hole in the venue server workings - 
> there is no way (that I know of) to back up the server, and if that was 
> available, of restoring it if it is trashed.  I presume that if a version 
> of the .dat file was available, it would be possible to manually restore 
> the server, but I have not encountered the instructions for this process, 
> if it exists.
> 

Yes, I've had this happen twice.

After the first time, I made a copy of the .dat file in a safe place.
After the second time I brought back the saved .dat file and when the
server was restarted, all the venues were there again (except for a few
which were added after I made my .dat safety copy).

chris


-- 
Chris Willing                      Telephone   (61-2) 9351 3914
Sydney Vislab, F09                      Fax    (61-2) 9351 5955 
University of Sydney
NSW 2006 Australia                http://www.vislab.usyd.edu.au