Thursday, 15th of January, 2004

Did you notice I was gone?
Some you may know the saga of the server… On the 27th of December 2003 the hard disk of the server on which this site (among many others) resides had a brain-fart. Well, it had a physical crash, which is, like, fucked-up mate. So it was completely off-line for a few days, until the guy hosting it bought a new hard drive, reinstalled RedHat Linux and got ssh up so I could login and start tweaking. So I practically learned how to get a server up and running again, hosting 16 different domain names, getting email coming in, re-creating users… The list goes on.
My joy when, at about midday on New Year's Day, I managed to get sendmail working (found the right config file to replace), was inestimable. Extreme. Profound. Suddenly all those emails that had been waiting in cyberspace started flooding in. Wow!

In the meantime the old hard drive was off at a data recovery place… Not the best time of year for this all to happen, so it took a while for them to get it all happening. I heard late last week from them that there were a lot of bad sectors, so there could be data loss…

Well this evening I finally got an email from the data recovery people (oh, and recovering data from a fucked-up hard drive is EXPEN$IVE!), and checked with some trepidation.

The guy had made everything available via ftp so I've spent the last couple of hours checking through everything, and in a recovered directory I found what looked like the mysql database files.
It took a good half-hour to reinstall mysql (after a couple of wrong turns – I'd copied over the mysql executables with the old ones, but they were the wrong version, so I had to reinstall the rpm…) and the mysql server on the new machine, then start the mysql server.
So imagine how I felt when I pulled up the Movable Type logon page once more, and it all worked! Logged in fine, and the four blogs I'm hosting all turned up, all entries and comments there…

I truly almost had a heart attack. All it took really was copying the entire contents of /var/lib/mysql
It looks like the FourPlay mailing list is pretty much gone for good – I can't find it anywhere. A lot of the directory structure is still there, but one or two partitions seem pretty much lost. I'll ask them further tomorrow, but luckily the /home partition is still there, so users' own data is fine, but /var was fairly chopped up. Lucky that /var/lib/mysql was there, although it was in a directory with a random name, so it was obviously rescued…
/var/spool/mail was the location of all the Inboxes for all the users, so that seems to be gone too… Two of the most important bits :( But anyway, at least the blogs are back, and a few other things. I'll see tomorrow what else can be rescued! *shiver*

4 Responses to “Absence?”

1. Peter says:
   January 15th, 2004 at 1:28 am

   Me am just a-checkin' dat da comments are workin'.

2. Peter says:
   January 15th, 2004 at 1:39 am

   Dis be a secon' commen' because I 'ave got da mt-blacklist plugin workin' and I am checkin' dat it be workin' proper. I 'ave bin watchin Da Ali G show on my compooter lately, as you might be noticin'.

3. Claire says:
   January 16th, 2004 at 12:59 pm

   Ouch! Makes me glad I do my stuff offline and just publish static pages. Of course it's been a while since I backed up my home machine….

4. [0-0] says:
   January 19th, 2004 at 12:00 pm

   … eeep! How unfun of it all to happen when pretty much everyone is on their end of year break!