The Damn Server

It was right there on my to-do list: “Impliment backup plan on server”. I had been focussing on the DNS problems, but backup was next on my list. In hindsight, it should have been first on my list.

Lucky for me, it doesn’t look like anything was scrambled when the server crashed hard on Friday morning. We had a power surge, it tripped the circuit breaker, I didn’t heard the alarm on the UPS, and after the battery died, the server’s power was cut.

It just goes to show that you never know how a computer will handle a hard shutdown. For months, we were having problems with the onboard ethernet card, and the server had to be rebooted by hand every other day or so. We never had any problems with just power cycling it during all that time.

Then the server was up and stable for several months, and then one power outage killed it. When I booted it up, it gave several error messages, and refused to recognize a net connection. Over the last few days I’ve been doing data recovery (successfully!), and the next step is to try to upgrade the OS on the server, in the hopes that will refresh the scrambled files. If it doesn’t, then I may not have a server anymore. I don’t have enough knowledge to reinstall the server and restore all the customizations that Steve had that made it work the way it did.

In case you can’t tell, in the meantime I’ve purchased hosting elsewhere, so that I could at least put up an error page, and be ready in case the server is beyond my abilities to repair. Rusted is the first full website I’ve restored. KMorg and Spaceninja are still just displaying the 404 page I put up. More sites may or may not be coming depending on how much luck I have with the server this weekend.

Anyways, no other real news besides the server situation and my rising desire to buy some liquor and drink my concerns away.

Oh, except that Annie got in another car accident. This is number four for her, I believe, but luckily, no one was hurt at all, they just got rear-ended (bumped) by a car full of high/drunk college students. Then a couple days later Annie twisted her ankle again, so she’s hobbling around in an air cast again. That girl is an accident magnet, I swear.

I’m off to lunch. Hopefully more cheerful posts will resume shortly.