[Slackbuilds-users] we're back

[Rob McGee]

As many of you already know, we had yet another hardware failure at 
harrier, the SBo mail server on 2013-10-02 at about 20:04 UTC. It 
looked like a SATA controller failure, but instead it seems to have 
been simultaneous failure of BOTH drives in a RAID1 mirror.

Go figure. Anyway, between an offsite backup and cautious copying 
from the less dead of the two drives, no data was lost. The dead 
array had all the essential parts of the filesystem" /, /home, /usr 
and /var.

Too many eggs in a broken basket (which had not given any signs of 
trouble, strangely enough!)

A problem with getting services restored has been the distance and 
real life obligations: Robby and I were not able to sneakernet a 
replacement drive to the colo facility. He uploaded what he could 
through his slow home uplink, and pulled big stuff from mirror sites.

Bit by bit we're getting back to normal. Some of you might have 
gotten bounces when trying to post to this list or one of the others 
hosted here. Sorry about that. Other than that I don't think any mail 
was lost, because I pointed DNS to our VPS which occupies the IP 
address which was "cardinal", harrier's predecessor.

I'd like to applaud and thank Robby for all his efforts. He took a 
day off work to retrieve the failed drives and bring them home, and 
as noted above he had a lot of work to recover the data. He also 
carried a replacement drive with a new install of Slackware64 
-current (14.1 beta).

And thanks again to the great community we have here: harrier was 
built with your donations!
-- 
    Rob McGee - /dev/rob0 - rob0 at slackbuilds.org