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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SIGNITEK is back on the Web!Site recovers from virus and administrative blundersAugust 28, 2002 In an attempt to recover from a Nimbda attack, some formatting files were deleted with the thought that Microsoft's Front Page would regenerate them. After many failed attempts to restore the site, the problem may only have been caused by an unreliable connection between the Front Page client and server. "After failing to connect to the site after four or five tries ending with 'server timeout' errors, we gave up!" says Siegfried Heintze of SIGNITEK. "When restoring the files from all three current backups and we still were unable to connect to the site, we assumed all three backups were bad". All the HTML files seemed to be intact, however. Only the formatting (theme) information and the navigation bars were lost. Over the summer months the long process reconstructing the site by publishing a very old backup began. The task was to retrieve the formatting information from the ancient backup and merge it with the current contents (which were not lost in the mayhem of the Nimbda attack). SIGNITEK researched different FTP and WebDAV programs to copy from the old site to a new temporary domain where the site could be reconstructed. Microsoft's WebDAV kept hanging, Microsoft's FTP would not transfer from one site to another and a cute little Java program called 'Server2Server' would not work. They finally wrote an emacs program to enumerate all the files in the directory tree of the old server and copy them to another server. That program took eight hours to write and several days to run. After the ISP removed Microsoft Front Page 2002 and reinstalled Microsoft Front Page 2000 server extensions again they were able to connect with the Front Page 2000 client to the old SIGNITEK site. At the time they thought it was because of the right combination of client and server versions. But then the 2000 client was constantly prompting for the password ever three seconds. Then they discovered the could occasionally connect with the 2002 client which did not exhibit this problem. "We now suspect that it had nothing to do with the different versions of the client and server. Our problem might have been that we were giving up after receiving the error message 'server unavailable' four or five times." This was great news because at least now they could down load the contents of the old site and try to add the lost theme and navigation. But then the best news became evident when they created a new temporary directory called SIGNITEK_MIN (which was created by taking an ancient backup that still had the theme intact and deleting everything but the theme) and dropped in the current files. Magically, all the navigational information was restored and the theme was propagated to all the pages. This was then uploaded to the public site. "What a relief" says Siegfried Heintze. "Our problems our solved. It may have been that nothing critical was ever deleted and the only problem was we became discouraged at the repeated 'Server Timeout' errors". The moral of the story: don't get discouraged by server timeout errors. Keep on rebooting, reinstalling and trying to reconnect. You may eventually get through.
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