Akatombo Web Log

Friday, October 06, 2006

When Good Disks Go Bad

Apologies to anyone who tried to access the site in the last 24 hours or so.  The hard disk on our database server pooped out, and though we had a good backup, it was a very time consuming process to get back up and going, mostly because the disk that was slowly dying was the boot disk of the system.  We unfortunately had no raid in place and so I had to reconstruct the server setup completely from the backup which is, by the way, not as fun as it may sound.  At any rate, things are back up and going and we plan to have things running on a raid once we finish migrating to a new server—tentatively scheduled for the weekend after next.  In all my time working with computers I have been extremely fortunate and this is the first hard disk I’ve ever had fail on me, so it was quite a surprise, and I learned a lot in dealing with it.  Thanks a lot to friend and guru Tod McQuillin for assistance when I got stuck, stupid, and/or frozen in sheer Unix-induced terror.

Please let us know by e-mail or in the comments if you encounter any strangeness.  I need some sleep now.