Future Site Downtime
 

The site's back online, obviously. Let me know if you find anything weird. I still have to optimize some of the configs. -Brandon 01/17 Noon CST


The harddive that our OS runs on is failing and could die at any moment, so I am working with our host to figure out the best time to take the site down, do a full backup, install a new drive, reinstall the OS, and rebuild everything.

It will most likely be this weekend sometime. I'll update this post with the exact date/times for the two outages. (First, to verify the drive is indeed failing, and second to do the reinstall)

The drive test will be 23:00 CST on 01/13/2009 (tonight) and could last 4-6 hours. The site will not be available during this time.

The drive is predicting that it will fail (ain't technology great?) .. so they're replacing the drive for us this Friday evening. The site will be down for 12-48 hours starting Friday after 16:00 CST (so, plan for all weekend) -- sorry for any inconvenience.

Re: Future Site Downtime
 

Man, 4-6 hours w/o CD? :eek:

*shudders* What harddrive do you guys run off of btw?

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Oh good, I'll finally stop being distracted from my math homework :p

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I suggest starting about 1 or 2 in the afternoon (your time) on Saturday, and getting it done in about 6 hours, then we won't miss anything...we'll be busy building....

Re: Future Site Downtime
 

4-6 hours for the drive test .. they didn't give a length for the OS reinstall .. it may be 6+ hours for that as well ..

I wouldn't schedule the OS reload until Friday night, so i can spend all day Saturday reconfiguring everything.

Re: Future Site Downtime
 

Wow, you never really think about such things as the hard drive until it starts to fail.

I shudder at the thought of thousands upon thousands of robotics fanatics struggling to find a suitable alternative, consequently killing hundreds of robotics-related websites and forums from the shear increase in traffic! :eek:

Just kidding. :D Thanks for the heads up! :)

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Can you have your host clone your old drive to the new one?

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Ah well more time to spend on DA I guess.

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Man I had my night planned already....way to ruin it....
joking....

Hope you fix whatever it is!

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There is the chatroom at http://frc-chat.webs.com/ that hasn't seen much traffic.

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Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
:eek:

Wetzel

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1600 CST = 4:00pm CST

Which means, 5:00pm on the east coast?

Less than 10 hours!

Hope the changeover goes well :)

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Yes -- and most likely I'll be taking things down an hour or two beforehand just to make sure I get a full database backup before they shut it down.

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If it's down all weekend do I get a $0.09 refund as a paid forum supporter?

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I think the 9 cents is credited to the time before you were a paid forum supporter

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One word: IRC :)

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We all hope it goes well. We'll see you when you get back.:D

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Good luck with the site. We will see you when you are back up.

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Up already. It must of went well. Sweet

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Whew, it was going to be a long day without CD.

Great work.

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lol, agreed. Friday night was tough enough!

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Thanks for getting the site back up so soon!

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Eh, the forums are up but apparently the pictures still have an issue.

-Mike

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Amen, lol!

I almost went nuts waiting for it to pop back up.

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yay my favorite website is back. thank god. i have this feeling im going to be chiming in with a lot of questions today. we have to try and make up time from only being allowed one day to work on the robot this week. bad weather sucks.

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So is there any update as to what all was done ect.? I am the type of person to where I like to know the details. lol

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More specifically, from what I have seen, the UFH emblem is not displaying...I'm assuming there are others, but that's the only one I've run across...

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Not being directly involved, I don't have all the details, but based on Brandon's posts, I'm assuming the following:

1. The hard drive's internal SMART diagnostics determined there was a potential problem with the drive.
2. In running a full hard drive read/write diagnostic, it was determined that the drive was indeed failing.
3. The drive was then replaced, and based on the series of messages I got, I'm guessing RHEL was installed, then the "hosting software" package(cPanel, etc), and finally the backup of the previous HDD was restored.

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Yep you got it all, Nate.

One more detail -- Brandon was going to wait until morning to turn the forums on, so he could double check everything (cd-media, ufh icons, etc.) but forgot the nightly backup would turn the forums on automatically. So he woke up to 4000+ emails showing SQL errors and server errors.

FUN TIMES.

minor issues .. everything went smooth. let me know if/when you find weird stuff. I'll be working on firstwiki later this afternoon.

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Great job, it was a pleasure to wake up this morning to find the site back up

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yep great job guys...

Too bad there isnt cash for some sort of load balancing or something... or a raid setup.

That way nothing would go offline...

But you do with what you have.

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Great job getting all of that done in just 4 hours.

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I have time to finish my homework and play videogames whenever this site is down. I spend quite a big amount of time on this site. BTW, how long is the lifespan of a hard drive? I have a drive running 24/7 no breaks for months at a time

Re: Future Site Downtime
 

You do realize this thread is nearly 5 years old at this point. Right!?