FOCUSer.net

Apologise that the FOCUSer.net server was down for more than I like. It went off line at 8pm on Tuesday for hard disk change, and it is still in the process of rebuilding! In fact, the servers that all you guys are on at the moment is not the old server behind Scott’s desk at home that hosts the FOCUSer.net. Here’s the story.

Upgrading Hard Disk

First of all, the hard disk outage is worse than I have originally anticipated. The integrity just degrades dramatically since last week. I have actually got the new hard disk and new power supply ready for replacement on Monday, but I left it running for another day. Hmm. Bad move.

Anyway. I had really hard time pulling data out from the old drive and moving to the new one — not just blog sites but all my stored files, emails, photos, videos, documents, etc. The process took too long, as the old disk had really struggled. It was around 30Gb to move, but from the look of it the process won’t finish for another week.

So I tried to move some essential files first (around 4Gb) to get the server started. A lot of applications are damaged that need to be rebuilt/re-install, which I am doing at the moment. At the same time, I am also running “badblocks” over the old disk so hopefully that can be recovered and I can retrieve the other files/photos/documents. Although the non-destructive mode of scanning the disk is very slow — took 5 hours to cover 5%.

Bad News

So the old server is rebuilding itself, which will take ages (very old computer). The bad news is, I have actually lost some FOCUSer.net data! I tried to copy those folders from the old disk, but just can’t get anything out from it. Here’s a list of casualties:

• Database lost: Sites starts with ‘J’, ‘U’ and ‘V’ (that is, you, you, you and you). All posts and comments are lost. Everything. Oh wait, I have backups — from 10 March at 11:45pm. So anything new added between 11 and 14 March disappears…
• Blog directory list: So far I can identify two total write-offs — these two sites (there was actually a third anonymous site). Everything in their folders is just gone. Which I don’t have backup for. So I can only dump a generic WordPress 2 install into their sites and plug the database in. Themes are gone. Plugins are gone. Uploaded pictures are gone. I might try to look for backups again after I have scanned my old hard disk. Finger crossed.
• Random files: I have no idea what files are corrupted. The only one I can identify is one of Tom’s plugins (because the site failed to load). Do tell me if you found some files are missing/corrupted.

Gotta do more backup more often now.

New Server

To get the FOCUSer site back up quickly, I have decided to move all sites elsewhere. Instead of trying to fix my half-corrupted installation (I haven’t got PHP to run), I chose to move everyone onto a new server. A new server I rented from unixshell#.

It is a new Gentoo 2006.0 server. Dual Opteron at 2Ghz (read: pretty fast), and I have installed PHP5.1, MySQL4.1, LigHTTPd 1.4.10 to quickly get all the sites back online. The server is in Atalanta (which is on the south eastern coast of United States) and about 200ms from Sydney. Not too bad.

I have not got the FTP to work so those who have lost files would not have a chance to replace them yet — it will be available in a day or two.

This setup is a bit more expensive than before but hopefully the fund I have collected from Google would be more than enough to cover this :)