As was previously announced, the datacenter which hosts the xepher.net server went offline for building power repairs this morning. Things came back up this afternoon, as per the plan. A problem seems to have occured with one of the drives in Arclight (the server behind xepher.net) and it's refusing to talk to the machine anymore. Thankfully I had the foresight to build the system on a raid5 array, meaning the loss of a single disk doesn't actually result in data loss. That's why you're still able to read this post here, because everything is still working. Normally, I'd do some troubleshooting, and probably end up getting a new drive shipped to the datacenter and installed. Problem is, I go on a week-long trip tomorrow morning. Thus, that's gonna have to wait until I get back. While the remaining drives should be just fine and keep everything running until I can replace the bad one, I don't like having no redundancy. I'm currently trying to backup all data to my desktop here, but it's a lot of stuff, and my cable modem is relatively slow. Hopefully it can grab everything before I leave tomorrow, but whether it does or not, I'd still suggest everyone make sure they have their own data backed up, just in case. If it decided to drop ANOTHER drive towards the end of the week, my backup would be several days out of date too.
Anyway, I don't want anyone to panic (at least not as much as I am) but I just wanted to post that in case the worst happens, and you wonder why the server is down. Really, the chances of another drive failure are pretty slim, especially considering they survived whatever hurt this one. Heck, the old server ran on just 2 drives for 4+ years with no problems! I just tend to be overly cautious and concerned sometimes. I'll be back next sunday, the 17th, and hopefully I can get a new drive shipped to the DC and installed shortly afterwards. I'm gonna just look at it this way for now... this isn't a problem, the problem was forseen, and prepared for, and the redundancy is working as planned. Something pretty bad happened to the hardware, but everything's still chugging along just fine! Yay for being prepared! :-P
