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Topic: Server failure August 2012

First of all: sorry about you all having to wait for the forum to come back, but here we are again!

Last Thursday evening one disk in the RAID mirror on the server that hosts the VPS that runs this forum (among other things) was found to corrupt data written to it.  This was reported to the company the server is rented from, and they quickly responded to replace the disk.  Now Murphy got involved, and around the time they replaced it or just after that, the second disk started to fail too, before all the data could be synced to the new disk.  As a result most virtual machines running on the server got corrupted filesystems and we decided that it would be best to re-install all of them.

And Murphy got involved again, as over the past days I had planned/promised to do other things (like a family party & my promise to help my dad putting a new roofing on his garage), which meant I didn't have time to fix everything right away, and it took me a couple of days…

Now everything should work again, but if you still see any strange behaviour or missing posts, please let me know in this thread!

2 (edited by gedakc 2012-08-22 00:51:28)

Re: Server failure August 2012

Thanks Jan for your hard work and dedication to getting the GParted Forum back up and running.  :-)

For posterity sake, I believe the outage occurred on August 16, 2012.  The forum was restored and back up and running on August 21, 2012.

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Re: Server failure August 2012

The first disk failed on Thursday, August 16th and there was a brief outage then, but the forum quickly came on-line again.  The second disk was discovered to be failing too on Friday morning, and I put the forum in adminstrative mode Friday around noon (when I got he message about that) while we were investigating the damage (no point in allowing new posts to the forum if they were likely to go lost).  By Friday evening, it was clear that too much damage occured, and we would have to install the VPS's again once the second disk was replaced too (not only my VPS but also those of some other people hosted on that server).

But on Saturday I had to go to the family party, so no time to reinstall then.  On Sunday I reinstalled the VPS & the most important stuff on it (e.g. my mail server).  On Monday I did the roofing thing at my parent's place.  That's how it took me until Tuesday to fix the forum.  smile