Thanks again for all the well wishes. I was hesitant to address the donations idea, because it just feels kind of crass to be asking for money while the server is down... like I'm blackmailing the community or something - "Hahaha all your precious journals are GONE! GONE I tell you hahaha, BUT WAIT, for a low, low price of the blood of your firstborn and a spare kidney (you really only need one after all), I might be able to get it all back online again! Call this number or else the puppy gets it". But since people keep bringing it up, I guess I should just address it: There is an existing paypal account that I have been using as the online donation mechanism on crazyguyonabike since 2006. You can send donations through paypal to
neil@crazyguyonabike.com if you like - but please note that it's not necessary in order to get the server back! I'm not extorting anybody, and I feel just a little bit dirty for even talking about accepting money right now. But thanks anyway, I do appreciate the thought! And the cash, obviously, heh heh heh. Mexico here I come! Ehh, who am I kidding.
Incidentally, the "General Delivery" option is very interesting, but would probably just entail a bit more work for me, as I would need to keep going into the main post office in order to check to see if there was any mail waiting for me. If people prefer to send donations via snail mail, then it would really be better to just wait until I have the site back up, and the regular donations page is visible again (it will show my new address).
On the server front, the UPS tracking says it should be here by 10:30am, which would be nice. I need to figure out some stuff like power leads (I doubt very much the old place included any, and I don't know if the new place has them).
Assuming they actually did include a working spare drive in the box (I asked them to purchase it a while back when we had another drive go bad, so it should have been sitting on a shelf all this time, but honestly, who knows), it might still take some time to get back online even once the server is plugged in. Reason being, the new hard drive has to be configured, formatted and re-added back into the RAID array, and then data needs to be mirrored from the other drive in its pair. Copying 150GB of data takes a little while. This is actually quite a risky period, since obviously the remaining "good" drive from the degraded pair will be getting read intensively and fully. If it fails too during that time, then we lose the whole thing - RAID10 can withstand multiple drive failures as long as they are within different pairs, but if both drives in a pair fail then it's hasta la vista. In any case I'll probably need to get all new drives eventually; I currently have eight of the 150GB 2.5" 10k rpm SATA, the only upgrade option I can see out there seems to be the 300GB version, which is something like $160 new, or $75 refurbished from Newegg. There are eight of these drives in the server, and we're at 70% disk capacity right now, so eventually I'll have to upgrade, or else get a new server (sometimes that turns out to be more cost effective, surprisingly - it seems that in my experience, by the time you get to the point where you need to upgrade, the industry has moved on to some new "standard" like SAS or whatever and it's cheaper to just get new everything with that, rather than upgrade the old hardware... seems insane, but sometimes that's just the way it is). Anyway, I'm not making any conclusions, these are just early thoughts.
Anyway, thanks again, I may be offline for a portion of today sitting in the datacenter with a crashcart nursing the server back to health, but I'll be sure to post later whatever happens.
Neil