The forum was down for a while, as most of you no doubt noticed. Here's what happened:
Since about September last year one HD has been reporting errors intermittently. Timeouts and other bad things litter the logs, but I wasn't aware of any of this until, a few days ago, I tried to back up the site and the server rebooted.
And then it rebooted again.
And again, and so on, until basically it wouldn't run for more than about fifteen minutes at a time. I swapped out the RAM, the CPU, the PSU and the HDs to no avail. It wasn't an OS problem, sometimes the system wouldn't even POST.
At first I thought it was the drives, 'cause you know - drive errors - why not? I bought a nice mirrored RAID setup to host the site, but when reinstalling the OS it started rebooting again. SO! I bought a new motherboard as well. Same old RAM, same old CPU, but now on a spankin' new AOpen mobo.
Things appear to be back where they were. Let's hope they stay that way.
Sorry for the downtime.