This morning the Dimensions server went down and didn't as usual, come back up. I tried to reboot it remotely, but no luck. When I got to the office, the power supply seemed okay, but no video, no boot. Now this was no ordinary machine. To get decent performance I had installed a top-of-the-line SCSI controller and ran all sites from a high-speed Cheetah drive.
My biggest fear, of course, was that the disk had gotten fried. So I installed the SCSI controller and disk in another Linux machine. It recognized the controller, but then went into an infinite RPL-ROM-FFC count. No go.
Fortunately, in anticipation of the eventual failure/demise of the main server I had built a new machine a few months ago. That one with dual 300GB serial ATA drives in a RAID arrangement, 2GB of high-speed RAM, and a special server board. Good thing I had that machine sitting on the rack.
So now it was time trying to see if the new server would get along with the SCSI controller and Cheetah disk. At first, no go. The system complained that expansion ROM in PCI slot 1 could not be initialized. I checked in the BIOS and it was enabled. I googled and found that expansion ROM is only necessary for SCSI controllers if you want to boot from them, so i turned it off. Amazingly, it now worked. The server took a long time analyzing and initiating hardware, then brought up Kudzu to configure the SCSI controller, then took a long time to set swap space, then complained about competing boot partitions, but chose the proper one.
With great anticipation I used the hardware scanner to see if the SCSI disk was recognized. It was. So I mounted it and the data was all there. Fortunately I had done a full system backup two days ago, so a full restore would get all the websites back. Sadly, I had not done a MySQL database backup for the forums in a week, and that would have meant the loss of many thousands of notes. I ran a backup on the old SCSI disk, but that yielded a file that seemed entirely too small. That's because the utility was backing up an earlier restore from the new box, from circa late-January. So I located the MySQL files and copied them over manually.
Of course Apache then wouldn't start. Apparently, the security is much tighter in Red Hat ES4 than it was under goold old RH9. So I had to change a bunch of settings before Apache even recognized the HTML root directory as a directory. Now Apache started, but I could still not bring it up from another machine. That's because, after all these years, you still need to enter a static IP address manually in more than one place.
Stunningly, everything came up, and not a bit of data was lost. At least that's what it looks like so far. I was lucky, and the whol thing was quite an ordeal. Fortunately I didn't make any major mistakes or pushed the wrong buttons.
The little machine-that-could really served us well over the past four years. It was just a little 2GHz Pentium 4 box with a generic motherboard. The only thing special about it was the memory and the Cheetah disk. Yet, it reliably ran for four years, serving over 800 simultaneous users on Dimensions and also running all of my technology sites. Not bad. It was a good machine. May it happily compute in computer heaven.
Now I feel as if I had just run a marathon. Whew.
My biggest fear, of course, was that the disk had gotten fried. So I installed the SCSI controller and disk in another Linux machine. It recognized the controller, but then went into an infinite RPL-ROM-FFC count. No go.
Fortunately, in anticipation of the eventual failure/demise of the main server I had built a new machine a few months ago. That one with dual 300GB serial ATA drives in a RAID arrangement, 2GB of high-speed RAM, and a special server board. Good thing I had that machine sitting on the rack.
So now it was time trying to see if the new server would get along with the SCSI controller and Cheetah disk. At first, no go. The system complained that expansion ROM in PCI slot 1 could not be initialized. I checked in the BIOS and it was enabled. I googled and found that expansion ROM is only necessary for SCSI controllers if you want to boot from them, so i turned it off. Amazingly, it now worked. The server took a long time analyzing and initiating hardware, then brought up Kudzu to configure the SCSI controller, then took a long time to set swap space, then complained about competing boot partitions, but chose the proper one.
With great anticipation I used the hardware scanner to see if the SCSI disk was recognized. It was. So I mounted it and the data was all there. Fortunately I had done a full system backup two days ago, so a full restore would get all the websites back. Sadly, I had not done a MySQL database backup for the forums in a week, and that would have meant the loss of many thousands of notes. I ran a backup on the old SCSI disk, but that yielded a file that seemed entirely too small. That's because the utility was backing up an earlier restore from the new box, from circa late-January. So I located the MySQL files and copied them over manually.
Of course Apache then wouldn't start. Apparently, the security is much tighter in Red Hat ES4 than it was under goold old RH9. So I had to change a bunch of settings before Apache even recognized the HTML root directory as a directory. Now Apache started, but I could still not bring it up from another machine. That's because, after all these years, you still need to enter a static IP address manually in more than one place.
Stunningly, everything came up, and not a bit of data was lost. At least that's what it looks like so far. I was lucky, and the whol thing was quite an ordeal. Fortunately I didn't make any major mistakes or pushed the wrong buttons.
The little machine-that-could really served us well over the past four years. It was just a little 2GHz Pentium 4 box with a generic motherboard. The only thing special about it was the memory and the Cheetah disk. Yet, it reliably ran for four years, serving over 800 simultaneous users on Dimensions and also running all of my technology sites. Not bad. It was a good machine. May it happily compute in computer heaven.
Now I feel as if I had just run a marathon. Whew.
