The Shark Blog is now back in operation after a catastrophic hardware failure Monday morning that put my business webserver out of commission for almost two days. I had to buy and configure a whole new server and the business went back to normal on Wednesday. Fortunately, I keep good backups. If you're not good about keeping backups, you should do a better job of keeping backups. It's more important than brushing your teeth. If your teeth fall out, at least you can get dentures. If your computer dies without backups, there is no substitute product, you are perfectly hosed.
The Shark Blog took a nice vacation while I put everything else back in order and figured out how to get Movable Type working on the new machine (Hint: the blog/db directory and all of its files have to be chmod'ed writable by everybody, so nobody can write to them, doh! That's a UNIX pun, in case you missed it). The blog is now tanned, rested and ready to once again shower my goodness upon you all. Just in time for Rosh Hashana. Shana Tova, everybody.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at September 26, 2003 07:00 AMWelcome Baaack! I've really missed you.
Posted by: Alene Berk on September 26, 2003 05:50 AMAll's right with the world, almost. At least my day begins properly.
Posted by: ed on September 26, 2003 06:06 AMNew server, and no latte tax to boot. You're sitting pretty, dude.
Posted by: Richard Bennett on September 26, 2003 03:30 PMOf course, we expect that the liberals will blame Bush for your server outage, complain that it's taking too long to restore it, that only the likes of IBM, Microsoft, and Dell are getting the orders for new parts, and will demand that you relinquish your Blog to the UN for proper oversight.......
Can you tell that I've had severe Shark Withdrawal? So glad you're back in time to save my sanity!!
Posted by: ipsofacto on September 26, 2003 09:14 PMYes, very important. backups backups and backups.
Posted by: Florida on September 27, 2003 03:21 AMYup, when it comes to backups, it's not whether you're paranoid, it's whether you're paranoid enough.
Posted by: David Gillies on September 28, 2003 09:59 AMI can attest to the importance of backups. Last week the power supply in my server blew and killed both hard drives (a fifty cent part on the drive controllerd would probably have prevented that). My tape drive, which should have made this hardware failure a mere annoyance, never worked properly so nearly everything is lost (a few things were backed up on another system, but only a fraction of all files).
The server is still down while I save up for new equipment. I've decided to replace everything since I can't be sure the dying power supply didn't damage the motherboard. I'm hoping to get a DVD burner as a backup system.