I need advice, not a fix, re: restoring an old phpBB board

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Fogbow_Foggy
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I need advice, not a fix, re: restoring an old phpBB board

Post by Fogbow_Foggy »

Short version:

On 21 Feb. 2021, my former hosting company informed me that my VPS was entirely lost. I thought all my backups were on my server, and it was all gone.
On 22 Feb. I started a new phpBB board at a different hosting company. That board is running well at https://thefogbow.com/forum/

Recently I managed to find a local backup of my database - more than 2 GB, a phpBB board going back to January 2009, with more than 1.2 million posts.

I have restored the old forum to https://formerly.thefogbow.com/forum/, updated to v.3.3.8, and I'm in the process of updating extensions and styles.

HOWEVER, I must keep the old board disabled, I can't have two forums going simultaneously. I need to allow people to view the old forum, search the old forum, link to the old forum, but not post to the old forum.

So far, I have disabled registration of new users, and disabled the board.

What else should I do? I'm sure I'm missing some tweaks that could help do what I want to do here.
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Re: I need advice, not a fix, re: restoring an old phpBB board

Post by Brf »

Disabling registration should be fine, but there is not need to disable the board. Just change all of the forums to read-only in group forum permissions.
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Re: I need advice, not a fix, re: restoring an old phpBB board

Post by Fogbow_Foggy »

Ah, an excellent suggestion. I shall do that.
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Re: I need advice, not a fix, re: restoring an old phpBB board

Post by thecoalman »

One other option not mentioned is you can use program like HTTrack locally to convert to html files. You can go in and do one time edit to templates and remove all unnecessary links etc. I guess it would depend on whether disk activity or php execution is less of an issue. The benefit of this is you o longer need to be dealing with keeping it up to date. You will lose the search function though.
Fogbow_Foggy wrote: Thu Aug 18, 2022 1:22 pm Short version:

On 21 Feb. 2021, my former hosting company informed me that my VPS was entirely lost. I thought all my backups were on my server, and it was all gone.
I'd question how that is possible, servers are usually in RAID5 disk array and the loss of one disk is inconsequential. In any event ultimately you are responsible for your data. look into AutoMySQLBackup

https://sourceforge.net/projects/automysqlbackup/

There is multiple ways this can be used like using FTP to send the backups to offsite storage. The default settings keep a daily backup for 6 days. The seventh day it creates a weekly backup and on the first of the month it creates a monthly backup. The older ones are rotated out on configurable interval, e.g. you only have 6 daily at any time going back the last 6 days or 5 weekly. I just keep the Monthly for long term storage.

With Windows task scheduler I execute a WinSCP script each night and it downloads that day backup to my local machine.
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Re: I need advice, not a fix, re: restoring an old phpBB board

Post by Fogbow_Foggy »

thecoalman wrote: Thu Aug 18, 2022 9:37 pm
Fogbow_Foggy wrote: Thu Aug 18, 2022 1:22 pm On 21 Feb. 2021, my former hosting company informed me that my VPS was entirely lost. I thought all my backups were on my server, and it was all gone.
I'd question how that is possible, servers are usually in RAID5 disk array and the loss of one disk is inconsequential.
Trust me, I thought it wasn't possible either. My hosting company told me my server was lost and unrecoverable, so sorry, we're not telling you what happened. And I had backups on it using the WHM program they provided, but when the whole thing crashed they said "we have a sort of backup, but we don't support WHM anymore, we only support PLESK, so you're on your own trying to reinstall and reconfigure WHM from scratch ..."

It was a very bad day.
In any event ultimately you are responsible for your data. look into AutoMySQLBackup
True, and I will. I still expect a different level of service from hosting companies, and most of them I"ve had were better than 1+1.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/automysqlbackup/
There is multiple ways this can be used like using FTP to send the backups to offsite storage. The default settings keep a daily backup for 6 days. The seventh day it creates a weekly backup and on the first of the month it creates a monthly backup. The older ones are rotated out on configurable interval, e.g. you only have 6 daily at any time going back the last 6 days or 5 weekly. I just keep the Monthly for long term storage.

With Windows task scheduler I execute a WinSCP script each night and it downloads that day backup to my local machine.
Interesting, but at this point I am not allowing further edits to the DB, so why do I need to back it up nightly? I don't. I have a backup - I restored it from a backup, as noted above. I still have the backup I used to restore it, and since it's a static archive now, it can just sit.


At this point my need is not backup, it's links. My users at my ongoing forum want to link to posts on the old forum, and they're coming out without the subdomain, i.e., the links say "/thefogbow.com/forum/..." instead of "/formerly.thefogbow.com/forum/..."

Can anyone help with that?
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Re: I need advice, not a fix, re: restoring an old phpBB board

Post by Lumpy Burgertushie »

you need to change the url setting for the old board. if you can access it using the admin panel you can change it there. if not, then
you can change it directly in the database.

also, if you did not actuall create a true subdomain for formerly.thefogbow.com then you will need to do so or just use the actual url to
the old board's files.

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Re: I need advice, not a fix, re: restoring an old phpBB board

Post by Fogbow_Foggy »

Lumpy Burgertushie wrote: Fri Aug 19, 2022 4:38 pm you need to change the url setting for the old board ... you can change it directly in the database.
Did that, using phpMyAdmin. Thanks, Robert.
also, if you did not actuall create a true subdomain for formerly.thefogbow.com
I did, using cPanel, at my new hosting company. And I installed (long ago) the "post numbers" extension on the old, archived board. So if you click on any post number on the old forum, it correctly copies the URL to that post, and can be posted in the new forum. Many of my users have been with me a dozen years, they want to link to old stuff in the archive forum.

And TBH, things are working reasonably well, EXCEPT that I seem to have lost my admin password, which would not be a problem except that:
  • If I click "forgot my password" it says only that the form is invalid, and
  • my hosting company doesn't allow me to send email using the PHP function of the board, so I am never going to get an email with a link to reset my password.
I do have access to phpMyAdmin, is there any way to reset my password?

On the bright side, my new forum has a database of manageable size, my users are happy I was able to restore 1.24 million of their posts, even if archived, and they're being patient while I work on this thing.
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Re: I need advice, not a fix, re: restoring an old phpBB board

Post by warmweer »

Since you have db access:
For an emergency founder account see viewtopic.php?p=15519436#p15519436.
Create that account, the using that account edit your original administrator account. Log in with your own founder account and remove the emergency founder account.
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Re: I need advice, not a fix, re: restoring an old phpBB board

Post by Fogbow_Foggy »

Thank you so much, warmweer, I shall follow those instructions.
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Re: I need advice, not a fix, re: restoring an old phpBB board

Post by Fogbow_Foggy »

OK, that did not work, but I know why (I think).

The password included in the SQL query is 21232f297a57a5a743894a0e4a801fc3, but all the password hashes in the database start with argon2id$ ...

Here's part of an entry in the _users table for password: $argon2id$v=19$m=65536,t=4,p=2$MlVCQS followed by a few more additional characters, you get the idea.

They all start with $argon2id$ but the password included in the instructions for creating an emergency founding admin does not match up.

So maybe the instructions need to be updated? I am not trying to cause problems here, but when I used Admin1 as username and admin as password I just got another dialog saying the submitted form was invalid.

Thanks for any help you can give here!
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Re: I need advice, not a fix, re: restoring an old phpBB board

Post by Fogbow_Foggy »

Here's another odd thing -- my own username does not appear in the _users table, and the number 1 user id went to anonymous, but there's no number 2 user id. Somehow my user information row in that table has disappeared, apparently.

I have no idea how that could have happened. I certainly did not delete any users or even look at that table before this afternoon.

I have, however, deleted the new user created by the SQL instruction for the emergency founding admin, because even though it was not usable, it was not a legitimate user.

I'm stuck.
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Re: I need advice, not a fix, re: restoring an old phpBB board

Post by warmweer »

Fogbow_Foggy wrote: Sun Aug 21, 2022 6:09 pm OK, that did not work, but I know why (I think).

The password included in the SQL query is 21232f297a57a5a743894a0e4a801fc3, but all the password hashes in the database start with argon2id$ ...
That's normal (and as expected)
Fogbow_Foggy wrote: Sun Aug 21, 2022 6:09 pm
So maybe the instructions need to be updated? I am not trying to cause problems here, but when I used Admin1 as username and admin as password I just got another dialog saying the submitted form was invalid.

Thanks for any help you can give here!
Delete /installer and /production from /cache
Delete browser cache and cookies
Then try to login with Admin1
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Re: I need advice, not a fix, re: restoring an old phpBB board

Post by janus_zonstraal »

Delete browser cache and cookies
Then try to login with Admin1
Or try a other browser or private mode.
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Re: I need advice, not a fix, re: restoring an old phpBB board

Post by warmweer »

Fogbow_Foggy wrote: Sun Aug 21, 2022 6:17 pm Here's another odd thing -- my own username does not appear in the _users table, and the number 1 user id went to anonymous, but there's no number 2 user id. Somehow my user information row in that table has disappeared, apparently.
as to anonymous having user_id = 1 >>> that's normal
about your own account > check if it was there before the SQL was used.
The SQL doesn't delete anything, just adds 1 record
Spelling is freeware, which means you can use it for free.
On the other hand, it is not open source, which means you cannot change it or publish it in a modified form.


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