Gifts for the Hatbox, Emergencies and Crystal Hall

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This weekend has been a case in point for what can go wrong.

Piper's move from one apartment to another across New Jersey got complicated by bad plumbing, bad weather and a bad disk drive. Yesterday, while Piper was getting a moving van, loading it and taking some things to storage, the BC database went flakey and corrupted four stories, maybe five. Cat and I, working with a few telephone hints from Piper managed a rescue of 98% of the data and got the site back up in less than five hours. Piper would undoubtedly have been able to have done it faster and might not have lost a few kudos and comments doing it. We are stressing the database servers on BC mightily and have a plan to ease that as soon as some other things get done, including Piper's move.

Later last evening, a server running a few smaller websites (including one we use for passing large files back and forth) lost a hard drive, one only ten months old, so we think it may be under warranty but we bought and had a new one shipped to Denver to be installed Tuesday or Wednesday by the fine folks at FDC.

This morning, the database for Crystal Hall went down. We should have that back up this evening and not to worry too much, the site is redundantly backed up. Piper is busy cleaning her old apartment and I would prefer she do the work because Cat is out of town today visiting friends in London and I don't know all the passwords on that site.

There's less than a week left in the month, we just had a $160 unexpected expense and we are still short of our goal for the month. If you can give, we will appreciate it and it will help us stay online. Here's the Amazon Hatbox Link and the link to Janglewood for P**P**.

Thanks.

Hugs,
Erin, Piper, Cat, Kate and the gang.

Comments

Might a hosting company work?

that will make sure the hardware keeps running? For example Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure?

Anne Margarete

they have one

dawnfyre's picture

but they have a co-location deal, any hosting company that offers such bows out of maintaining the hardware.

what would help would be having the servers actually in the same town they are in. [ more access = more control ]

the issue is co-location service providers are not a common service.
[ I have managed to get one hosting company local to me to agree to let me do such with them, if I ever get the money for the hardware. ]

oops, that lets the cat out that I know a whole lot more about it than most. ;)


Stupidity is a capital offense. A summary not indictable.

Hosting

erin's picture

Running on someone else's hardware has proven too expensive in the past. We have colocation agreements with NYI in New Jersey (about 50 minutes from Piper's new apartment) and with FDC in Denver where most of our backup and minor servers are located. In addition, we have a DNS shared VPS server in Pittsburgh and cloud services rented from three different providers that specialize in various things. It sounds chaotic but it works. :)

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Too bad you don't have

Too bad you don't have something like Logix's "Metro Ethernet". It's _nice_ service. 20 megabit, up and down. That's what most of my systems are using.


I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.

Crystal Hall

Upon investigation it appears Warren set the CrystalHall forums offline while investigating an error that appeared to be linked to disk space. We have cleared some extra space on this server and are now seeing if there is anything else we can do that might help get them back up and running soon.

Just to clear up a possible misconception, we do not routinely hold the passwords for any of our customer sites, occasionally we will request or be offered access when a particularly sticky problem occurs. Piper and myself do have logins for the server in question where we do all of the maintenance.

Hugs

Cat

-
You can't choose your relatives but you can choose your family.

CrystalHall Forums are now

Piper's picture

CrystalHall Forums are now back up and running.

-Piper


"She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them."
— Geraldine Brooks