Pixy’s got the explanation here:
The server blew up. :(
Dan reported that the site was down, and I took a look, and the server was reporting 6 bad sectors on the drive. 6 bad sectors isn’t a disaster, but it could well be causing problems, so the first thing I did was start a full backup.
At that point, the entire server melted.
Currently we’re running on an old backup on a different server, which is why we’ve time-warped back to December. Once the techs at our hosting company have the server running again, I’ll be able to inspect the damage and hopefully bring the site back up to date.
I’ll keep you posted on the recovery process.
Many thanks.
o/t: I saw this yesterday at the gym, and I started laughing. CNN was really working it:
$65 isn’t even enough to buy a nice pair of earring, what like Michelle likes. I
Hope! Change!
Breaking and entering!Neighborhood stabilization!Server asploded, eh?
I wondered if thor might have sat on it. Being the tough guy he is, a server would probably have less chance than even an octogenarian.
Faster yet slower. The GWB one back in 2001 was $300. This will take almost 5 months to get to $300 plus the month and a half before it gets started. 6 months isn’t fast. Nor is it the fastest.
The $787 billion “stimlus” is about $2600 per American. Maybe we should hold an Americathon. Back to those thrilling 70’s.
I love that one, Carin.
At least we won’t have to worry about that initial heady rush of check getting. Assuming that a typical family has two paychecks, we’re talking about a $7.55 windfall every week.
I have a question that I haven’t seen an answer to. Are we changing the tax rates? Because if we’re not, there are going to be some very surprised hopeychangey folks when the time comes to file ’09 tax returns. Lower withholding isn’t going to change the tax obligation. It’s just diddling with the flow rate.
$65 won’t even cover a single bill that we have. Not one. What with all the taxes and stuff, it won’t even pay our phone bill (for which we have the most BASIC service available to us.)
I think I’m going to spend mine on one of those really nice pump-up air rifles.
That way when we’re reduced to eating rabbits and squirrels, I can kill them without upsetting the hippie neighbors.
Get a real rifle SBP. In a pinch hippie neighbors can be used to fatten up the hogs.
You could buy a cheap stuffed monkey and ship it to the whitehouse every week for about $13. Kind of like a Boston Monkey Party.
Imaging a truckload of stuffed monkeys arriving at the whitehouse every week. All in good fun, of course. Who doesn’t love monkeys?
Hmmmm….
You might could send one to Benjamin Todd Jealous.
How about a stuffed monkey that when you look into it’s eye you see all 57 states? $19.95 plus S/H
As you can see, I was able to recover the main database. The last two months of the Pub are still AWOL, as are various other databases.
I’d just got through from a week-long emergency database fixing-upping project at work, like, *ten minutes* before Dan let me know that I had another fire to fight.
Sometimes I just want to be a potato farmer. You know where you are with a potato.
Blight!
Good thinking. I’ll become a blight farmer. There’s always demand for a good blight.
I am many things, but never cheap.
Pixy Misa,
Thank you for all the hard work and effort you put into keeping Protein Wisdom and Ace of Spades up and running.
Pixy does PW too? My top three sites are all administered by Pixy.
Actually, by the time the OS knows that a disk drive has any bad sectors, the drive will have detected hundreds or thousands of them, and silently substituted good sectors from a pool of spares. The drive does not tell anyone that these sectors are bad; only certain low-level utilities can get at that information. So those six known bad sectors are the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Your disk drive is on borrowed time and you should replace it as soon as practicable. It may be that the manufacturer has a utility that can do a true low-level format of the drive, reallocating away the known bad sectors and establishing a new pool of spares (therefore reducing the nominal capacity of the drive), but I still wouldn’t trust it in a production environment. Downtime is just too much trouble.
Thanks, The Monster. Pixy, I think, was making this simple for us non-technical types.
The Monster – yep. The drive has already been replaced.
Unfortunately, the usual nightly backups I run weren’t working properly on that server. So now I’m trying to scrape whatever data I can get off a rapidly dying hard disk. :(
Has anyone taken or confirmed Wolcott the Walrus’s alibi re where was during the server meltdown? Anybody?? ? ???
If any Pub posters want to reclaim their missing posts, check out my (reclaimed) post.