Crash & Burn

No, it isn't what I did due to the crazy work hours I've been putting in. No, it isn't what happened most recently to our much-in-need-of-attention house. Eru, the server that runs dour.org, decided to crap out in the middle of the night just before March.

After spending a few hours one night trying to resurrect what I thought was a failed drive, I took some much-needed time off work the next day...only instead of relaxing, I spent the time trying to repair the server. Well, all hope was lost...the server just decided to outright fail.

Luckily, it is still one year within warranty (amazing thing, five-year warranties). But it means I have to ship it to them on my dime for repair or replacement. So either it gets repaired for free and I get the same server back, or I get an upgraded more recently built server at a slight cost. All the while I would've been without a server. Ichtsnay I say.

So I spent the rest of Friday night and Saturday morning trying to find a short-term replacement server. All I could come up with was our oldest notebook in the house. Since that notebook was set to be reinstalled anyway, I put the latest version of my favorite distribution on it and set to making it the replacement Eru.

Amazingly, since I prefer a lean and simple distribution, it took little more than two hours to create a fully-functional replica of Eru once I had restored my data from backup. All the custom-compiled software I use to run the site ran almost without issue. I had to recompile Open-SSL, turn off one of the more recent versions of a library that the distribution included, and then re-install the hordes of stuff from CPAN that I used in my perl development.

So the notebook is now sitting in Eru's place at the colocation data center. Eru is sitting in my basement being readied for shipment to California. And we're back on the net (albeit with less processor and memory than before). Yay!

I tell you, it was a weird two days without a constant flow of email to my blackberry...