Lens cap on?

15 Jul 2005

This message was originally posted on a temporary “outage” page, hosted at an alternate location. It is retained here for archival purposes. The timestamp has been altered to reflect this fact.

Technical Difficulties

Due to a hard drive failure at approximately 5AM EST today, this website will be offline for a period of at least two days.

The web server is maintained by Michael Dale, and the hosting of this website is provided free of charge using his own resources. My personal website has been hosted there since the end of February 2004, and for nearly a year and a half uptime has rivalled that of servers sitting in datacenters.
This, in and of itself, is hardly unimpressive. However, when you consider this has been achieved with only a “consumer-grade” ADSL connection and open source software, the quality of service—especially a service provided pro bono—is brilliant.

StreetComputing will return shortly, with the same host, running the same software.

In the interim, this holder page is temporarily being hosted by base10solutions, a web-development and multimedia company for which I work.

What does this mean for this website?

As stated already, this website will remain hosted by Michael for as long as he is willing. However, as a result of the failure of a hard drive, a small amount of information has been lost.

Whilst database backups are automatically made by the server daily, I have been a little lax with backing up files. Consequently, a small number of images assoicated with posts have been lost. This only affects some posts, identified as the following:

• Why not to use prebuilt templates;
• H.264 scares me;
• If I swam, and;
• On rails

I hope to have replacement content for these posts in the near future. Until this content is prepared, the posts will continue to be available (when the server is again live), albeit without visual content.

Michael’s announcement

The following was sent via email to web hosting users.

Subject: [dg-support] Hard Drive Failure
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 06:56:54 +1000
The hard drive in the web server (metro) died this morning at about 5am. Unfortunately I am leaving to the Hunter Valley in 10 minutes and do not have time to look at it. I will be back on saturday and will start looking into the problem then.

I do not know what the state of the drive is. I’ve never had a Seagate drive die on me.

The last backup of mysql databases was today at 3am and home directories on the 8th of this month. I do not know if I can recover any data from the hard drive.

Please expect the webserver to be offline for at least 2 days, although a full rebuild may take much longer.

Very very sorry about this.

During this time email will continue to work as it is handled on a different server.

Please email me if you have any concerns.

Thank you,
Michael Dale