Missing categories - Major issue, please help.

Ok from the start;

We had our site reported as down by a customer. When I checked the site, all that was there was CentOS welcome page. I assumed that there had been a major technical issue with out Webhost. I asked them to look into it and they said they were working on it now and to check again in 10 minutes.

The website was restored, but products that were listed as sold had become available again and we were missing categories in the menu and products which we had just put on were no longer showing. It was like they had restored back to DB backup that was 1 Year old.

So I asked them to double check and make sure they had the correct backup, they said they only keep 10 days anyway so it can't be that old.

I've just been able to log into PHPmyAdmin for the first time and I can see that the categorises do appear in the tables and the products are also in the products table.

After days of back and forth the webhost finally said that they though our site had been subject to the injection, here is what they said: " further to my review it would appear that the initial issue was actually a site injection i.e someone externally took advantage of the sites code which caused the first issue, once we have ensured the site is working I will then review the updates around the site to ensure its patched."

So the question still remains what the hell could have caused this strange issue?

I'm currently downloading the site to perform a Winmerge against a fresh copy of ZC, see if that throws anything up.

ZC site version: 1.3.9h (I realise this is an old version, but I'm currently working on a 1.5 upgrade with template change and was waiting until that was finished before doing anything).

Any advice / help welcome.

Many thanks in advance

Logicalstep

I niticed you never got an answer... welcome to my world. Did you find anyone to help you? If so, give me their contact information. I have an issue that is not covered, can't figure out how to start a new question in the forum and can't get zencart to help me no matter what i do?

Do you maintain daily database backups??

BarbScott:

I niticed you never got an answer... welcome to my world. Did you find anyone to help you? If so, give me their contact information. I have an issue that is not covered, can't figure out how to start a new question in the forum and can't get zencart to help me no matter what i do?

You can start a new thread by navigating to the proper forum for your question (General Questions, for example) and click on the Post New Thread button at the top (which you seem to have done 3 or 4 times.) Generally, if you don't receive some sort of reply to your post, it's because we don't understand the question. Try posting in the same thread again with new/clearer information.

Hi Kobra,

No I don't unfortunately my host uses Plesk and its very restricted. I have no real Idea of what they have restored when they say they restored the Database, I'd like to think its a complete image rather than table level exporting.

No I don't unfortunately my host uses Plesk and its very restricted
Don't they offer you phpmyadmin??

If so
http://www.zen-cart.com/content.php?144-how-can-i-do-a-site-backup-or-use-phpmyadmin-for-database-backup

Hi kobra
Yes they do offer php my admin, but I was lulled into a false sense if security. After asking them about any way to do a full image backup a few months ago, they told me there was no need as they kept full images for the last ten days.
This is an oversight on my part.

However like I say I can see the info in the database and there aren't that many products affected, so if I needed to manually change a value I could. The problem is I have no idea what casing the issue and where to start.

I'm a little confused. Are you saying there are categories and products in the database that don't appear on the site ? If so, are you sure you're looking at the same database the store is connected to ?

Ha, that was my initial thought, so I double checked with the host. My thinking was that its a cloud based service and maybe there is some old instance running somewhere, but they are sure I'm looking at the right database. I only have one database in my host panel for Zencart anyway.
I guess I could try renaming the database I can see and seeing if Zencart breaks, but I'm a little worried about doing that before easier options.

My thoughts are that it's all DB related, but are there any files that could cause this, or is that not possible. Another interesting things is that in plesk the Logs have a massive gap in them and guess what...it seems to be about the same amount of time that we are missing in terms of product updates and customer details....so it looks like they may be related.

I've never used Plesk (which is sounding like a good thing) but in your position, I would probably create a new database, Export the old one using phpMyAdmin and Import it into the new one, then point the store to the new one, just to see what happens.

there aren't that many products affected
Well if there aren't that many - just re-create them from the admin

update for you:

It turns out that when the major server crash happened, the host in restoring the server, they had pointed the Name records to an instance of our server which was a year old!. I discovered this when trying to make changes to the files on FTP wasn't having any affect on the website.
They have now redirected the records and I'm just waiting for them to update.

This has taken them a week and me telling them that I was looking at a different instance to get fixed...not happy at all they didn't spot something so obvious.

I'll keep this updated if it doesn't start working again, but for now, thanks for the assistance.

Logicalstep

they had pointed the Name records to an instance of our server which was a year old
Well servers can malfunction/crash but another instance???
Looks like they do not keep their servers cleaned up!!

That's correct, the thing that worried me and that took so long was the fact that there seemed to be no internal log of the changes they were making to the system and as such, one person didn't know what had or hadn't been done and this contributed to the delay.
I'm now going to take weekly backups and as soon as I can (given I'm doing a new template and upgrading to 1.5) I'm going to move hosts.
They have never been that reliable, we had all sorts of issues with renewing thew SSL Cert as well and I monitor the up-time with Pingdom and I'm always getting emails.

There is a massive problem in the UK of finding a decent host, it looks like all the review sites I see are just fake comments and scores.
I wish we had a bluehost in the UK. I think I'll stick with Cpanel hosts from now on, most have automated backup services that can be run by the customer and not have to rely on the host.

Thanks again for your help, I'm sure you'll read more 'help-me' posts around the forums whilst trying to get the new design sorted!

Logicalstep