I recently moved my Discourse instance (forum.fortelabs.co) to self-hosted (on a Digital Ocean droplet following the migration instructions exactly).
It’s worked fine for about a month, but today it is down and I have no idea where to begin troubleshooting. I think it probably involves SSH, but all I know is what I did in the migration instructions.
Could someone please help me, or point me in the right direction?
Out of disk space? Out of memory? Does a command line rebuild help? I suggest contacting https://www.literatecomputing.com for support as needed.
DNS lookups for forum.fortelabs.co shows that it’s a CNAME for buildingasecondbrain.hosted-by-discourse.com, which I’m guessing is one of @codinghorror et al’s boxes.
@fortelabs, check the fortelabs.co DNS provider settings and make sure you’ve got an A record for forum that points to the correct IP address.
How do I find the correct IP address? I logged into Digital Ocean and it says the “public IP address” is 159.203.116.191, but going to that address in the browser just opens a registration page, so I don’t think it’s right.
Just tried to enter it in GoDaddy anyway and it said "Enter either @ or a valid host name such as: “subdomain.domain.tld”
Maybe it changed the last hour, but no:
;; ANSWER SECTION:
forum.fortelabs.co. 3599 IN CNAME fortelabs.co.
fortelabs.co. 3599 IN A 50.63.202.1
50.63.202.1 is a GoDaddy IP address, so this looks like a DNS issue indeed, since GoDaddy is not hosting your forum - just the DNS.
So what you should do is go into GoDaddy DNS control panel and change the IP address for the @ entry to 159.203.116.191.
I’m working with a programmer friend, and he says it looks like my migration to DO didn’t actually take place, and my community kept using the Discourse-hosted instance, which just shut down today.
Is there any way to recover a backup for Discourse-hosted instances @codinghorror ? I have no problem paying for support, but I have a sinking feeling that I just lost my database. My friend says time is of the essence.
I’ll contact literatecomputing now just in case.
I changed it just now to @, which I think is why it’s pointing to the root domain.
I already tried entering the IP address in the “points to” section, but it just says ""Enter either @ or a valid host name such as: “subdomain.domain.tld”
Well, 159.203.116.191 does end up at a box which thinks it’s forum.fortelabs.co, but it’s also an unconfigured Discourse instance… seems like your backup hasn’t been imported properly.
You should change the type for that record from CNAME to A.
Ok, just did that, but I think the bigger issue now is that entering 159.203.116.191 in a browser takes me to an unconfigured instance, which makes me think I didn’t complete the migration properly.
I think my community continued to use the Discourse-hosted version, and it just got culled today as part of regular maintenance.
Just crossing my fingers there’s a backup of the data somewhere…
If you did perform a migration, you have downloaded an export and uploaded it again into your new instance, right? So then the export should still be somewhere on your computer, and/or on the new instance?
I followed these official installation instructions exactly (I thought), but I don’t see anything about downloading the instance, nor is there anything in my saved files on my computer, which I keep very organized.
Yes, you followed the installation instructions, so now you have a brand new forum.
You didn’t migrate.
Your only bet is that @team still has a backup lying around.
Damn, I think you’re right. I was so happy that I was able to follow the instructions, I forgot about the actual migration part.
Crossing my fingers for @team to come through for me …
Sure but business hours aren’t for a while. It’s Sunday.
Yes of course, sorry to bother you!
Hi Tiago,
I have a copy of your site backup from the date the site was marked for decommissioning. I’ll contact you via e-mail to arrange for its transfer.
YES! Awesome, thank you so much.
The backup has been transferred, so we can call this done.