I’ve been running a webserver for about 4 years. Up until about 3 weeks ago the longest the server had been down at any one time was 36 hrs. This was to move from L.A. to the Seattle area. Even when the motherboard went on my old hardware, the downtime was 8 hours.
I’d gotten to the point where I was hosting for about 10 sites. (Counting my own)
Three weeks ago while tempting fate, I made the obscene comment that the current “Mercury retrograde” wasn’t really hitting me like it typically did.
Within 24 hours, My server, My server’s main drive, and my backup system all died horribly. After 3 weeks of replacing hard drives and ordering replacement hardware I have about 8 of my sites back up on temporary hardware.
As far as I can tell, there was no data loss.
Granted, I have my internal server drive sitting on the desk exposed as an external plug in drive… but it’s there.
Convincing Mac OS X that it wanted to let Apache work at its full strength was interesting. My Apache knowledge (which was pitiful to begin with) went up a level yesterday.
So, most of my regular websites are back up. The SQL, CVS, and SVN based ones are still in process. But it’s a good feeling to have stuff running again.
Now I just need the new hardware to get here. (Bad idea ordering UPS Ground just before a 4 day weekend)