site outage, hardware failure

[offroadgeek]

hey all - so I come home from my BALUG meeting, only to find out that the server is completely down.

Obviously I curse several times, panic a bit... then look at the issue.  This time the whole thing was down... (unlike earlier at 4pm where the main site was up but the forums was down)... I couldn't do crap from the console...  I was getting disk I/O errors... and it wasn't even responding to the shutdown command.

I had to forcefully bring the server down, and when it tried to boot up... I got 'invalid boot disk... insert a bood disk to continue...' (or something like that).  This is when I realized how bad it was

Luckily my brother helped me out... as he's a much better sys admin than I am.

Long story short, the spare server that I was planning on building with slackware (haven't been able to get the ISOs yet), already had RH9 shrike and all the packages we needed.  It was as simple as pulling the hard drive from the bum server, making it a secondary drive and pulling whatever data we could from it.

I had recent backups for the forums, but it was even luckier that we were able to get mysql dumps off of the drive... which means the data should be as recent as when the whole thing went down (hopefully!).

Anyway... the site is now running on the spare server.  I still plan on building out a slackware server to move the site to, but know at least we know that it probably wasn't a RH9 issue, rather than a disk issue.

I'm TERRIBLY SORRY for the issues we've been having recently.  I hope that you all bear with me through this.

Thanks,

offroadgeek

[Stubear]

OFG,

Thanks for letting us know what's going on.

Sorry to hear that you are having hardware difficulties, always happens at the wrong time doesn't it.

Thanks for all your hard work, its very appreciated

Stu

[dougeeebear]

Sorry to hear of all the problems. I just recently joined the forum after purchasing my Z.
It has helped me out very much, and I also try to help out if I have an answer to someones questions.

This forum and your efforts are greatly appreciated.

Doug

[bluedevils]

I had figured as much.  I assume the plan is that once the slackware is done, then this server will become a hot spare?  That should minimize down time.  I am glad for your personal efforts to keep this community together.