Death And Destruction: All Fixed

[NFG]

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.

[Aidan]

We had been discussing the box being left in Japan...

'm not anticipating failures. It's dead easy to make a system reliable, and since I'll have 100% of the content backed up remotely in the event of a failure I'll just set it all up on a different box.

At least you would have been able to recover the data on the SQL server, should you have been in Oz. It's a good reminder in some ways, that computing kit isn't 100% reliable.

Having just suffered a machine trashing it's BIOS after running continiously for six months, I can feel your pain. Even more so in this case, as the machine was providing a site to site VPN for a company.

[NFG]

SQL kinda baffles me.  I need to find a decent backup solution that will allow me to port the forum a little easier.  As it is I kinda have to just make everything the same on the replacement box - drive letter, directories, computer name, etc - or it just fails and takes forever to repair.

Also, backing up Windows is a massive PITA.  =/

[Aidan]

Which SQL database are you using?