What Happened To The NPPA Web Site?
DURHAM, NC (September 14, 2009) – The Web site of the National Press Photographers Association, which has been offline for about a week now, went back online today after a cascading series of technology problems that started over the Labor Day weekend resulted in a total loss of Web server data.
"We apologize for the outage and appreciate your patience," NPPA executive director Jim Straight told members today.
"On Saturday during the Labor Day weekend the NPPA’s Web server, hosted remotely at a local data center, suffered what was described to me as a 'hard crash'. When the machine was rebooted it was found that one of the programs that controls logging in had become corrupted and it was crashing the server as soon as it was loaded.
"Our IT director was able to restore the server over the holiday weekend by excluding that particular corrupted program, but that corrupted program was vital to the operation of several key functions of the site including the store, the 'Find-A-Photographer' feature, and the job and internship banks. So the IT director continued testing to determine and correct the problem.
Straight said that on Tuesday evening, in an attempt to rule out hardware problems, NPPA's data center replaced the Web server. "When that happened, we permanently lost all of the Web server capabilities and data," Straight said. "None of the data on the drives was recoverable."
Since then, NPPA's technology staff have been reinstalling all of the programming and data from the Web site, including a back-end database, onto a new Web server using a back-up file created on the day before the problem started.
"The site is now operational and complete, except for some views of contest winners," Straight said today. "We are currently rebuilding that thumbnail index, so it should not be long before that is complete, and the directory index is being rebuilt as well."
Straight urged NPPA members to contact the IT staff via eMail at webmaster@nppa.org if any users have a problem with the site, or for problems using NPPA's online store users should write to sales@nppa.org. For membership needs or renewals, please write to members@nppa.org. "And you can always call the NPPA office at +1.919.383.7246 and listen to the menu to reach the right person," Straight added.
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