Mark's personal blog

They cry like children when the data goes "bye bye". Yesterday I had an aweful scare. I have for the past 3 years had a dedicated server with Netdirekt and I have had no real complaints. I have had a some minor issues but none of great importance. My server had been up and running for 290+ days without a reboot (which is not uncommon for a Linux server at all) but when I got to work yesterday morning I couldn't access my email or connect to the server via SSH. A quick search on Google told me that I was not the only one having this problem. There was some speculation if this was a network or power problem but in the end people started reporting their servers coming back online but mine was still dead. I took it easy and assumed that it would come back online when it was ready. Several hours later I was still unable to reach it and I started getting worried. What if something like the harddrive had been fried or something. It is after all an old machine with old hardware. I tried going into my online server administration tool and rebooting it but that did nothing. Then I tried to boot it into rescue mode but that didn't work either. At this point I was starting to get really worried because all my email from the last several years are in Maildirs on that server and I access it all via IMAP so I have no local copy. I then wrote a hasty email to Netdirekt technical support and crossed my fingers that it was just because someone forgot to push the start button on my machine. After a little while I could check my email again, access the server via SSH and not long after I received an email that my server was back up and running. Thank you lord of computer hardware for not punishing this fool for not having backup. You would have thought I would have learned my lesson when a had one drive die on me in my desktop which was running Raid0. Luckily back then it was a new setup so I only really lost a little bit of configuration. Today I sat down and set up a simple backup system using rsync, SSH, tar and some simple shell scripting. Why on earth I never did that before I don't know. I even have rotating backups in case of corrupted or unintentionally deleted files. I used http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/113847 as inspiration for most of my scripts. But also the use of pg_dumpall came in handy to make sure I have backup of my Postgresql database. Now I just need a server out on the Internet somewhere with enough space to backup all the most important stuff from my home computers. All things in due time. I am hoping to be able to get my hands on a couple of 146GB harddisks for my IBM System p5 505. I have found some on ebay but the shipping and import taxes scare me a little. I want this computer up and running soon though.