tim-back-up.txt - monochromatic - monochromatic blog: http://blog.z3bra.org
 (HTM) git clone git://z3bra.org/monochromatic
 (DIR) Log
 (DIR) Files
 (DIR) Refs
       ---
       tim-back-up.txt (2613B)
       ---
            1 # I'm back up !
            2 
            3 05 August, 2014
            4 
            5 In the past few days, my whole server (and thus, my website) was down.
            6 
            7 Everything is now back to it's normal state, so I'll give you a quick
            8 explanation about what happened.
            9 
           10 ## TL;DR
           11 Quickly, here's what happenned (the whole process took approximately 2 weeks):
           12 
           13 1. Changed distribution
           14 2. Changed hardware
           15 3. Realised new hardware is broken
           16 4. Bought new hard drive
           17 5. Fallback to old hardware
           18 6. Reinstalled distribution
           19 
           20 ## I'm sorry
           21 As you can imagine, I did not plan such a long downtime. It was, at first, only
           22 a matter of 2 or 3 days, but ended up being almost 2 weeks. So first of all,
           23 please accept my apologizes.
           24 
           25 ## The situation
           26 Now, let me tell you what happened. Some relatives gave me an old PC they were
           27 not using anymore. It had a dual core and 2GB of RAM !!
           28 
           29 So I decided it was time for my old server to retire a bit, and by the time, to
           30 change the distribution powering it. I settled on
           31 [alpinelinux](http://alpinelinux.org), a fairly light and fast distribution
           32 powered by musl libc and busybox.
           33 
           34 The install went fine and I brought the server online again. And then, it
           35 began...
           36 
           37 ## The problem
           38     ─── ssh z3bra.org
           39 
           40              __   __
           41            /'__`\/\ \
           42      ____ /\_\L\ \ \ \____  _ __   __
           43     /\_ ,`\/_/_\_<\ \ '__`\/\`'__/'__`\
           44     \/_/  /_/\ \L\ \ \ \L\ \ \ \/\ \L\.\_
           45       /\____\ \____/\ \_,__/\ \_\ \__/.\_\
           46       \/____/\/___/  \/___/  \/_/\/__/\/_/
           47 
           48                             -- silly, isn't it ?
           49 
           50     Enter passphrase for key '/home/z3bra/.ssh/z3bra.org':
           51     ─ g ── cd ~/src/www/monochromatic
           52     ─ g ── vim last.txt
           53     ─ g ── make
           54     /bin/sh: /usr/bin/markdown: I/O error
           55 
           56 *OooOh god, what happened...?*
           57 
           58 I'd better shut it off before it goes bad...
           59 
           60     ─ g ── sudo poweroff
           61     /bin/sh: /usr/bin/sudo: I/O error
           62     ─ g ── su -c poweroff
           63     /bin/sh: /usr/bin/su: I/O error
           64 
           65 .. Too late ...
           66 
           67 By the time, I was not sure wether the problem came from the hard drive itself,
           68 or the whole mother board.  
           69 I decided to boot the drive from my old server, and I did not have any problem
           70 from it. Looks like I could only rely on my good ol' hardware.
           71 
           72 ## The solution
           73 
           74 I finally decided to buy a new hard drive, and to run it from my old
           75 hardware. The motherboard of the "*new*" one was on the end of its life,
           76 and having all my data on an USB external drive was a bit of a pain in the neck.
           77 It boots slowly, and if I'm not careful, I can just kick it and loose all my
           78 datas.
           79 
           80 I finally reinstalled alpine on the new hard drive, and finally brought the
           81 server back up !
           82 
           83 It feels good to be online !