Messages

Greetings Sylvanites,

I know you haven't heard from me for a while, but rest assured I am still here and working to keep the world running as smooth as possible.
In light of this, I am announcing a scheduled downtime this weekend to do server improvements and upgrades.
This shouldn't be a long-term downtime, but may take a few hours.
I am planning on working on it late evening Friday and/or early morning Saturday.

If you try and connect and it isn't working, just sit by and try again in 30-minutes.
Hopefully everything will go smoothly.

-Llewellyn

Greetings all,

Just wanted to let you know that the server will be down for a few hours this afternoon as I do periodic maintenance and updates to the OS.
I will post in this thread when I am finished and it is back up and running again!

Llewellyn

Greetings Sylvanites

Many apologies for the recent down-time.
It has been a crazy time of year with the Holidays and associated travel.
The server is currently up and running and hopefully it will stay that way for a while.

They say bad luck comes in 3's and here is to hoping that we will stop at 2 this time....

-Llewellyn

Gosh durn-it.
Stand-by everyone.

Working now. Apologies for that. I was trying a new network configuration and thought I was smarter than I actually was
>.>

Llewellyn

Yup, As you might have noticed I managed to get everything running again.

Llewellyn

I am on the problem like the best of blood hounds!
I shall soon sniff out the culprit,

Llewellyn

Thanks for the well-wishes. It seems like they were quite expedient since Nate has come and gone and there is no damage anywhere near my house. I am glad to report that I have returned home safe and sound. Not even the crappy privacy fence I have been wishing would blow down had a board missing

Seems like service was uninterrupted for the duration and things are running smoothly as ever.
Time once again for me to fade back into the shadows, where I sit and watch the world turn.
Always watching.

-Llewellyn

Greetings all fellow Sylvanites,

Sadly "Real Life" rears its ugly head again and it seems like the rain-check I received with Harvey, Irma, and Maria has come time to be cashed.
Nate is scheduled to arrive at my door-step within 12 hours and I have secured and tired down everything that I can. I took the time this morning to do a complete server backup (both local, remote, and on a USB key) and have started turning off all non-essential electronics on the same backup battery. I am going to leave it up and running for as long as it can (hopefully forever) but the weather gets to decide that ultimately.

I am not worried about my house, property, or the server itself. Mainly my concern is downtime due to power/internet outages. The backup batteries should coast us through any temporary outages, but anything over an hour will get us.
I am leaving now to drive out of the path, Hopefully keep you guys all updated and I learn things.

-Llewellyn

Looks like the temporary server is holding steady.

I have the next two hours to watch it.
Can someone (besides myself) log in?

Thanks,
Llewellyn


..:EDIT:..
http://prntscr.com/cg5u2g
New motherboard in the mail!

Well...

Been an interesting few hours to say the least; actually damn near 5-straight.
Good news is that I have rebuilt the RAID using Ubunbu and the mdadm command. Half following the procedures at https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Recovering_a_failed_software_RAID#Force_assembly and half my own trial-and-error.  
All I have to say is Linux to the rescue once again.

The best news I have for you tonight is that I am copying the shard files over onto a clean USB stick for backup and migration.
I am going to attempt to stand-up a temporary server machine for the interim until I can replace the broken hardware.
Needless to say my office is a disaster at the moment as I had to pull just about every piece of computer equipment out of the closet and cobble together something to read these hard drives.
http://imgur.com/PeUwBZf

..:EDIT:..
Correction, I will try and throw up the temp computer/shard tomorrow after work. I need to go to sleep to get up for work in 5 hours. I gotta call it quits for tonight

Llewellyn

As promised, here is an update.

Sadly, no good news....
Looks like that less-than-graceful shutdown took down the motherboard or at least one of the capacitors on in.
Motherboard used: GA-EX38-DS4 Gigabyte rev 1.1, intel x38 LGA 775

According to the manual (page,99)http://download1.gigabyte.ru/manual/motherboard_manual_ga-ex38-ds4_e.pdf, the POST error-beeps I am getting is indication of power modulation failure.
This is not good because it means that I need a new main-board. Hopefully the processor and eveything else is ok, but I have no way of checking at at the moment.

The very bad news is that I cannot access the server files atm because they were on a RAID configuration to preserve data retention. That data retention is only for hard drive failure and not motherboard failure sadly.

I still have a few more tricks up my sleeve so not all hope is lost yet, but continue to be patient with me please. Real life is going to intercede over the next few days, but I should get 2-3 hours each night to work on this.

As an aside, if anyone has a working motherboard as listed up above I would like to hear about it and potentially buy/borrow it. That would simplify my life immensely.

I just got home late last night and had to work a full day today.
I had limited time today to work on it but will focus on it tomorrow after work.
The server is having some sort of weird power-cycling issue that might be storm/lightning related because the UPS that it is plugged into was discharged.
Most likely we had an extended power-outage that was too much for the UPS to handle and everything had a less-than-graceful shutdown.
Hopefully I can diagnose the issue quickly tomorrow and have everything up and running soon.

Thanks for the patience all,
Llewellyn

Going to do a router reset.
New router I got is having issues and needed to have firmware updated.
Total down-time should be less than an hour.

Many apologies if you try to log in and it is still down.

Llewellyn

Checked everything,

Looks like my ISP gave me a new IP.
Updated the DNS, should be live within 1-2 hours of this post time-stamp.
(11:40 AM CST USA)

Llewellyn

My diagnostics caught it as well.
Sadly they didn't pin-point what caused it exactly. The modem itself didn't show any connectivity loss and I was transmitting packets the whole time.
All fingers are pointing at the router atm.
I am going to keep a close eye out and see if I can catch it again.

Llewellyn