Crashed Disk
Last Tuesday – May 1st, at about 14:10 – the disk containing the webs and web-database crashed, and I only came to signal it on Wednesday morning. All of a luck, the public site and the database were backed up the night before, and I had a backup of the disk, though outdated. No backup of the private area, so I lost the logs archive. Pity, but a real problem.
This disk had given some problems before, just signalling errors but still available. So first I tried to recover is again – but this time the disk seems to be totally broken indeed.
So the first issue is to replace the disk and recover the (outdated) data, so the main structure had been repaired. This took a rather long time (there are really big files – the disk containers – and speed is only (!) 10Mb/second) and in the mean time I tried to figure out what went wrong and when. The latter was easy to locate, looking into the logfile: there should be messages of a disk be taken offline. Most notably however was the loss of LD devices: the disk containers containg database and webs!
After the disk had been restored, I mounted it and restored the public web (that was backed up on Monday night) and changed the home page to have the blog and forums not accessable: restoring the database and re-installing the software had to wait.
On Thursday, there was no time to complete this due to company requirements.
On Friday night, I started restoring the database. Pushing Monday’s backup into the one that came from the disk backup didn’t work at all, so I did a “re-install” of MySQL. That is: just starting it as if newly installed: created a new database, added privileged users and after that, ran the SQL-file that is the result of the backup procedure. This want perfectly and was done within minutes. Next, I re-installed PHPMyAdmin (which caused an update to the latest version), WordPress and PBPBB2. PHPMyAdmin went on without a problem, WordPress wanted to do an update and then had no porblem at all, and PHPBB2 failed.
On Friday night, I had the blog running again – so I could enter this post (to make a start, saved it as draft) and see if I could get on with the forums. That was started on Saturday night, but neither the basic one (used to test and investigate) nor the Dutch OpenVMS forums could be started. Both gave an error on any access.
This morning, I realized that the theme I used for the Dutch OpenVMS forums, was still missing so I installed it – and had to redo some editing to the frontpage image. but after that, it ran as before. The primary site remains in error and I don’t know what’s wrong. I contacted the PHPBB2 support forum, just wait and see. It’s not that imortant 🙂
Now the links on the home page could be restored, and for the normal user, all seems back to normal. On the operator side there is still some work to do, but that entry needed an overhaul anyway.