It was a day that will live in infamy. One that had catastrophic consequences that, only now, are we coming to terms with. The events of that day will perhaps never be properly understood, but from the evidence has been recovered here is what we can piece together.
A TIMELINE FOR DISASTER
May 5th 2006
Edinburgh had been laboring under what many locals were calling a “heatwave”. In reality this was nothing more than the thermometer hitting double figures, but the general mood of the city was buoyant. I was happily going about my working day, developing the new Net Resources website, polishing off some usability reports and generally enjoying the unusually clement Scottish weather when BAM!
Suddenly our battle worn veteran of a server Arkaig went belly up resulting in complete catastrophic failure of all web services. It couldn’t have come at a worse time. We were days from launch of our new company website, and nerves were already fried. As our development server as well, all student sites were down, as were a number of other sites including Renegade Zen.
May 8th 2006
Initial attempts to reboot the server proved fruitless. We couldn’t even login and assume root so it pretty much kaiboshed any remote fixing. There was nothing for it, we called for backup. The Linux equivalent of Mr. Wolf from Pulp Fiction, “Big” Rob Gray is the fixer we have always turned when the shit hit the fan. Problem was Rob was already in the field on another mission, so we were without our most valuable weapon.
Luckily he was able to dial in from the field and determining that the problem with server was unfortunately a hardware one, and we would no choice but to remove Arkaig from the data centre and bring her back to HQ for more testing.
May 12th 2006
Top priority was to get the Net Resources site moved over to a new home. We’d be thinking about this for some time, so although it’s never nice to do something like this out of necessity, it was probably for the best. We left all other sites in place for the moment. Hey, it wasn’t like the server was going to be down for long right? Wrong!
31st May 2006
Arkaig was eventually brought out of the data centre and back tot Net Resources. Initial diagnostics weren’t good. While no data was lost, we would need to buy new IDE disks and completely upgrade the system.
une 2nd 2006
2 160Gb IDE replacement disks were bought only to find that they didn’t actually FIT in the caddies. Arggh!
June 6th 2006
New disks were bought and fitted successfully! Success. The operating system was upgraded and we just had to plug her back in the data centre and hope for the best.
June 13th 2006
Arkaig is back in the data centre. We just have to flick the switch and we’re back in business.
flick
Doh! Seems like we’ll need a bit more tinkering before all systems are A1.
June 15th 2006
Further config hacking and it looks like most services are now back online. Student accounts are working and the Zen is back in effect! Booya!
Almost… MySql is still not working, and as a result my blog is still floating aimlessly in the eather.
June 24th 2006
Still having difficulty getting MySQL to work. We upgraded form MYSQL 3 to 5 and this caused a whole heap of problems.
My blog had been offline for over a month now.
July 2nd 2006
Still no progress on getting MySQL to work. A combination of technical difficulties and finding time to prioritise.
I make the call to move my site over to a new host and start redesigning. I’d been thinking about it anyway and this just gave me the excuse I needed. I
July 8th 2006
installed Textpattern 4.0.3 on the new host and started designing the all new Renegade Zen. I just hope I can get my old blog posts still hiding in the bowels of Arkaig! I start on the initial designs for the site, and begin the development process.
August 3rd 2006
Nearly 3 months after the Big Crash of 2006 and I’m almost finished with the new and improved Renegade Zen.
The new site is looking great but there’s one problem…to date I am still unable to recover all the old posts from the previous version. That’s 2+ years of posts!
Present
I had a bit of a brainwave and used Google Supplemental index to find cached copies of some of my old articles. I couldn’t find anything after October 2005 but I did get a few of the older articles, so at least the new website isn’t completely empty.
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