So the recovery efforts from the other week's hard drive failure are wrapping up. Most services have been restored. We'll now make sure the backup logs go to the private list so that they don't require manual monitoring (embarrassing on my part). We're in talks with various a couple folks about switching off our host who shook us down for a measly extra $15/mo + fees in the midst of the effort -- and made us get a "quote" for that -- causing a delay in the recovery. At the moment we're required to pay for both our old broken drive and our new not broken drive because we'd have agreed to anything to get back up and running knowing that we could just stop doing business with them later. We lost NO code in this disaster and no code history either. We did loose some interim builds but all the milestones are there. We had to manually recover some blog entries. We lost some wiki content, but most was in google cache. We lost some forum data (very sorry about that). Sadly we'd have probably lost nothing (despite my mess up) had the hosting company read the ticket all the way and done what they had SAID their procedure was (and slaved the original drive while booting from the new one). Yet they instead installed the old drive...and wiped it too. After finally getting a clueful person who apologized and said a supervisor would call and explain the situation (they didn't call -- I had to file another ticket to request a "WTF?" on that to which I got that info and a "investigating ways to prevent this from happening in the future"), he explained that none of this was policy. All in all, I got the impression that they don't know what they're doing and don't "have our back" for what we pay them for. My apologies to everyone, we're still trying to operate infrastructure on a tight budget until the commercial launch and I just plain goofed up combined with the decline in quality of service from our hosting company. We'll get better and I hope our infrastructure will soon match the quality of our software!

On a happier note, Aron will be making another LUG tour announcement. Also I wanted to say thanks to the guys and gals at the DCLUG. What a great and very professional LUG. Sorry about the mess with the projector! It was great to see their enthusiasm for the project and very helpful to gather their advice and thoughts on areas for improvement. If you are in DC, I highly recommend stopping by and staying after for the Kabob! I'd worked through the night and passed out in the hotel when I arrived so I hadn't eaten all day...so I made a pig of myself :-)

We will have to make some schedule updates to the project as the outage and everyone kicking in to help with infrastructure did set us back a little. We're also likely to add an M9 release, and cut the scope of M8 as there are a lot of great new features that we'd like to release and mature before our first RC.