As those of you who stopped by this week realized, Dimensions was down.
What happened was that a freak power glitch nuked the power supply. After prior breakdowns I had built a server that was supposed to provide complete redundancy by mirroring everything from one disk to another so we'd always have a backup. Well, the power glitch fried BOTH disks. No other backups you may ask? Yes, I do them meticulously, but by now those are 9-gigabyte files that are hard to copy off a machine, and I thought they'd be safe on the mirrored disks. Live and learn.
So the past several days have been hell. I tried absolutely everything to piece things back together. The server turned out to be toast, and so I had to buy new parts and build a new machine. Then find bits and pieces and whatever local backups I have. Fortunately, I had done a complete separate backup of the Forum database and managed to restore that, after a fresh install of the Forum software.
So this is what happened. It was a lesson in many respects. Whatever can go wrong will. And the unexpected always happens. Whatever seemed like a totally safe choice will throw you a curve. The many incompatibilities and often almost comical problems I encountered could almost fill a book. I am so tired I can barely see straight.
I am now opening the server. The forums, after some scary hours where I had database problems, should be okay. But you may run into glitches, and the machine may periodically be unavailable. Most of "Dimensions proper," the older parts of the site, are gone and need to be slowly rebuilt, with help from webarchive.org. It will take weeks. And I still have to get several systems to work right.
During this very difficult week, AnnMarie helped me out by keeping people informed as much as she could. Thanks to her, a number of wonderful people helped out defraying these most recent extra costs with donations to my cb@pencomputing PayPal account. Those who did, THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! You are the best. The money that came in and may come in covers the cost of the rebuild and I'll use what's left over to build a full backup machine.
I am fried now, too. I probably slept a grand total of 10 hours this week. I could not sleep knowing the server was down and so much work awaited me in bringing in back.
What happened was that a freak power glitch nuked the power supply. After prior breakdowns I had built a server that was supposed to provide complete redundancy by mirroring everything from one disk to another so we'd always have a backup. Well, the power glitch fried BOTH disks. No other backups you may ask? Yes, I do them meticulously, but by now those are 9-gigabyte files that are hard to copy off a machine, and I thought they'd be safe on the mirrored disks. Live and learn.
So the past several days have been hell. I tried absolutely everything to piece things back together. The server turned out to be toast, and so I had to buy new parts and build a new machine. Then find bits and pieces and whatever local backups I have. Fortunately, I had done a complete separate backup of the Forum database and managed to restore that, after a fresh install of the Forum software.
So this is what happened. It was a lesson in many respects. Whatever can go wrong will. And the unexpected always happens. Whatever seemed like a totally safe choice will throw you a curve. The many incompatibilities and often almost comical problems I encountered could almost fill a book. I am so tired I can barely see straight.
I am now opening the server. The forums, after some scary hours where I had database problems, should be okay. But you may run into glitches, and the machine may periodically be unavailable. Most of "Dimensions proper," the older parts of the site, are gone and need to be slowly rebuilt, with help from webarchive.org. It will take weeks. And I still have to get several systems to work right.
During this very difficult week, AnnMarie helped me out by keeping people informed as much as she could. Thanks to her, a number of wonderful people helped out defraying these most recent extra costs with donations to my cb@pencomputing PayPal account. Those who did, THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! You are the best. The money that came in and may come in covers the cost of the rebuild and I'll use what's left over to build a full backup machine.
I am fried now, too. I probably slept a grand total of 10 hours this week. I could not sleep knowing the server was down and so much work awaited me in bringing in back.
