Resolved- Olga "has" had a bad hard drive

[klikmouse]

Hello all. First post here.

Frustrating, yes. But "thank you" to everyone who worked hard to get us back up and running.

[Matt]

Thanks and welcome to the forums.

Just so there are no false promises here, I do not think we are out of the woods entirely yet. I am seeing some disk errors no on the other drive in the array and as you may have noticed, the server is not as peppy as usual. We may need to put yet another new drive in here after this array has rebuilt itself. Obviously hoping for something much smoother than the first time around....

I will be sure to keep you posted with any news as it unfolds.

[Matt]

Okay good news and bad news.

The good news is the original machine has been outfitted with new hardware and is ready to take these drives and raid array back.

The bad news of course is we have to take thie servers offline to do it. We expect about 30 minutes for this changeout. We are going to do this tonight at 2 am.

This should clear up some of the load issues, and get us heading on the right track again. The machine running now is much less powerful than the orignal machine and it was the closest thing we had on hand that could be used as an emergency machine to keep your sites up why we took the original down for diagnosis and hardware replacement.

The way this has been going so far I would expect 1 hour of downtime where there are no services at all. If things go well it should be only 30 mins or so.

We will update you as services return to normal.

[cornnfedd]

matt - i can only conclude one thing and that is there is something wrong with the name Olga, i think you need to rename the server and everything will be fine..

what about something like Terminator? strong, cant be stopped, latest technology?

lol couldnt help myself.

[Matt]

LMAO.

I think you are on to something. For a little GlowHost history, all of the servers "used" to be named about very important women in my life. However, GlowHost rapidly outgrew important women in my life. GlowHost also has outgrown being "my" company and turned into am actual business entity very rapidly. The last 3 years we have been on the rapid expansion program. Hire new employees, try to figure out the latest technology, hardware, control panels and whatever else that modern day has to offer us.

We have been doing it a lot longer than 3 years, but the last three years has really brought us some very loyal customers who we are proud to host and be a part of their business.

I thought for sure I could always name a server after a woman important to me. After about 15 of them, the names started running dry.

Then we started looking for names that were short, and effeminate. We wanted to keep them named after women. We tried to keep them short and sweet. The concept there was that women never give anyone any problems...

Olga was the best thing I could think of that was a tank of a woman. This server is extremely beefy. Olga seemed to fit.

As time evolved, now we have men's names, names that mean nothing, generic names like "Server 1" and such.

So, since we no longer have any sort of naming convention, I think Terminator, Commando or Rambo might be good choices. Rambo would be my first choice because it is less characters to type. Carpal Tunnel and all...

Let us see how this turns out. Then a hostname "rename" might be in order.

[Matt]

This has been bumped back to 3 Am US EST.

[andreadoria]

Our goal here was to preserve your data from what could have a catastrophic drive failure. I think we succeeded in that department. Now we are stuck dealing with the hardware limitations of the raid array and waiting for it trying to rebuild itself.

Yea, I appreciate that, and the fact that I was able to get in and make a backup (which I didn't actually have) yesterday. So it's not like you're a bad person or anything.

Just, slow/unresponsive servers tend to freak people out.

Okay good news and bad news.

The good news is the original machine has been outfitted with new hardware and is ready to take these drives and raid array back.

The bad news of course is we have to take thie servers offline to do it. We expect about 30 minutes for this changeout. We are going to do this tonight at 2 am.

Half hour to an hour at 2 or 3am east coast is no skin off my back. Here's to it working out smoothly.

However, this thread affords only one logical conclusion : Matt, you need more women.

[Matt]

However, this thread affords only one logical conclusion : Matt, you need more women.

Thank goshness ( Is that a word?) there are still people with a sense of humor through this.

I'd name the next machine "andrea" but we alreay have 3 machines that begin with the letter "A"

I forgot to mention one of the early goals was to have exactly 26 machines, that way we could have one machine, that started with every letter of the US alphabet.

A) Alex
B) Betsy
C) Cleo
D) Deb
E) Etc

So that is enough history for you folks for today anyways. Olga has been down for about 30 mins so that was our expected threshold. I need to check in and see what the status is. I will report shortly.

[morganus]

Appreciate the hard work Matt.

Myself, I host a WoW guild forum on my site and quit 2 days ago with assurances the website would stay up and running even if i wasn't playing.

Next day the server goes down and i've got a few very anxious guild members emailing me asking why i took down the guild website including one very angry guild leader. LOL

Timing can be everything sometimes.

Keep at it Matt. Hopefully everything will stabalise soon.

Morg

[Matt]

morganus
Do you mean World of Warcraft?

Yes, timing is everything, then do not forget about Murphey's Law

Sorry you are getting worked over this, it is not your fault at all. Blame it on your host if you can

My eyes hurt...

Status report follows soon.