Page 1 of 5

Loss Of User Names

Posted: Mon Sep 17, 2007 10:24 pm
by Eric Werny-p40
Our former Stake computer rep installed two wards on one of the wards computer, due the addition of a Spanish branch in our building.


One Saturday the financial clerk of the original ward did his back up, which he claims was done in the normal manner.


Sunday when the Ward clerk tried to login, all of the user listing were gone. I search the drive and found the data files to make sure the damage was minimal.


The new Stake computer rep was called, and he said he didn't know that much about MLS, so I offered to help.


Here is what we found. Doing a standard deletion of the program through the control panel didn't work, until we removed the listing from the registry. Once that was completed we reinstalled the MLS software and all was well.


I thought I would pass that on.


EW

Posted: Mon Sep 17, 2007 11:13 pm
by russellhltn
Re-install fixed it? Did you have to restore the backup at all? I've heard of the MLS user names disappearing and I've been told the fix is to dig around in the data directory and go back to a older data set.

Posted: Tue Sep 18, 2007 10:07 am
by thedqs
I think what he meant was that those data files were in the right place but MLS just wasn't correctly reading them. Of course a restore should have worked.

Data Secure

Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2007 12:00 am
by Eric Werny-p40
Before we started the project we double checked all the data locations. We also had all the back up disks located.

Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2007 3:34 am
by russellhltn
OK, so if I understand you correctly, you re-installed AND restored the data, correct?

I believe it's only necessary to restore the data, and there are tricks to making that a quick process.

MLS Data

Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2007 10:12 am
by Eric Werny-p40
No, the data was in the proper directories. We just removed the registry listing, and did a reinstall.

We spent about 20 minutes on the project.

Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2007 1:16 pm
by russellhltn
If you look at Program Files\LDS Church\MLS\Units\{unit number} you'll see a mlsData directory and a number of internal backups. Renaming the mlsData and copying one of the backups into it's place should do the trick. The newest or second newest should do it.

If you delete or rename the Units directory, it will behave as if it was just installed.

Procedure to recover from MLS loss of user names

Posted: Mon Sep 24, 2007 12:28 pm
by danpass
RussellHltn wrote:If you look at Program Files\LDS Church\MLS\Units\{unit number} you'll see a mlsData directory and a number of internal backups. Renaming the mlsData and copying one of the backups into it's place should do the trick. The newest or second newest should do it.
This issue occurred for the second time in the same ward in my stake this past week. The first time, a couple of months ago, they were running MLS 2.6. Last week's occurrence happened while running MLS 2.6.2.

RussellHltn is correct in that there is no need to reinstall MLS. The problem seems to be caused by data corruption or data loss.

Here are the steps that we took to recover from this problem:
  • Opened the MLS unit folder indicated by RussellHltn above
  • Observed that the modification date/time was identical for both the mlsData the newest mlsData-Backup folder
  • Renamed mlsData to mlsData.bad
  • Copied the newest mlsData-Backup (the one with the same timestamp) folder to mlsData
  • Started MLS and found that the user names were still missing
  • Closed MLS and deleted the copied mlsData folder
  • Copied the second most recent mlsData-Backup folder to mlsData
  • Started MLS and found that the user names were now restored

Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2007 4:22 pm
by danpass
danpass wrote:This issue occurred for the second time in the same ward in my stake this past week. The first time, a couple of months ago, they were running MLS 2.6. Last week's occurrence happened while running MLS 2.6.2.
This past Sunday the ward clerk from this same ward called to inform me that this problem occurred yet again. He had been logged in to MLS earlier Sunday morning and then logged out and went home. Later, when he came back for their meeting block, he went to log in and the user names were gone. After speaking with all those that have user accounts he is pretty sure that the system was not used between the time that he logged off and when he came back. He did not notice anything out of the ordinary during his earlier session.

None of the other wards in my stake have run into this issue.

Arrrgh!

Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 1:30 pm
by danpass
danpass wrote:This past Sunday the ward clerk from this same ward called to inform me that this problem occurred yet again. He had been logged in to MLS earlier Sunday morning and then logged out and went home. Later, when he came back for their meeting block, he went to log in and the user names were gone. After speaking with all those that have user accounts he is pretty sure that the system was not used between the time that he logged off and when he came back. He did not notice anything out of the ordinary during his earlier session.

None of the other wards in my stake have run into this issue.
After nearly 5 months of not seeing this problem reoccur, the same ward that was having this problem before reported to me that it happened again. Early yesterday morning the ward clerk had used MLS and everything was fine. He backed up changes and exited MLS and shut down the computer without incident. Later in the morning, the ward was scheduled for a finance audit. The Finance Clerk, Bishop and auditor were present. They booted up the computer and tried to log into MLS. All the user logins were gone. They recovered by using the procedure described in one of my prior posts in this thread. They are running MLS 2.7.3.