Richy's Random Ramblings – Page 151 – Random ramblings and ravings of Richy B

Snippet: Server Downtime

March 16, 2003

*snippet* As some of you might have noticed, my blog was down for around 36 hours starting on Thursday night (at 23:43GMT). Basically, the server that hosts the *.beebware.(co.uk|.com) family of websites and a few others suffered a partial hard disk failure which resulted in data corruption. Luckily, it didn’t affect the “user data” part: only around a dozen files within the Linux /var/ settings (IIRC). Unfortunately, these files are needed by Apache, SSH and several other “system critical” options which meant the server practically failed 🙁

I alerted our technical guys to it (as when any of the “system critical” things fail on my server, I get lots of email alerts and SMS text alerts which wake me up) and they managed to shut down the server before any further data corruption occurred. Everything on the server is backed up on a rolling 24hour backup processes, but it’s still a case of swopping out the broken drive, putting in a new drive and copying the data across.

Due to various problems, I was given an initial estimate of “sometime on Monday”. Aarghhh! Not good at all 🙁 So what to do? Well, I had a quick word with someone I know at 3050 Hosting who managed to set me up with an emergency 30 hosting package (which is a cheap web hosting package at just £30 per year) and I just needed to point all the DNS entries at the new server after I put up a temporary “holding page”.

Why didn’t I use one of the other Beebware servers? Well, a) I didn’t want the holding page to be in the same “netblock” as the main servers (as it could have jeopardised some of the search engine placement results) and b) they didn’t have enough spare capacity for the load that the sites hosted by this server require.

No sooner had the DNS changes started to propagate across the internet, when my monitoring systems indicated the server came back on line with less than 24hours downtime (it came back up at 20:40GMT). I had set a “DNS expiry time” of 24hours – so the DNS wouldn’t start timing out until at least 3pm on Saturday…

Anyway – that’s what happened, I’m still waiting for “total confirmation” to come back from the technical team that they are happy that the server is running correctly – but everything seems A.O.K. to me at the moment: but it’s just a case waiting for DNS to re-stabilise (I didn’t think it’ll be fair to do a “Guess That Movie” competition when only a few people could probably access it).

I’ll try and get “normal service” resumed shortly…

Guess That Movie: XXXVIII: Bean

March 12, 2003

4 Comments

[Guess That Movie Round 38] Dr. G now moves up by 100 points by correctly guess that Round 37‘s image was, in fact, taken from the 1973 movie “The Asphyx” amazoncom:6305470146 within 10hours and 59minutes – Kymberlie, meanwhile, was happily confessing that she is, in fact, an executive transvestite. I don’t think I really want to know do I? 😉

Dr. G moves up to 160 points once I update the high score table – still short of the magically “500 points claim point” but there’s still 7 more rounds after this one to go. Prizes HAVE been dispatched, but Amazon.com have experienced a slight technical fault with processing of the gift certificates so one or two of them may be delayed whilst they are looking into the problem (basically, because of the fault they can’t get into the order to dispatch the certificate – nor can they or myself cancel the order!) – apologies for the delay.

Anyway, here’s image 38 – it’s not the one I was hoping to feature: but every time I tried to play the DVD I wanted to take this round’s image from it crashed my machine. 3 times. It’s not the DVD’s fault (as it’s worked before), but just Windows being silly b–ggers as it has been for the last few weeks…

Take a guess at the image and let me know which movie you think it’s from! <adopt camp voice for Kymberlie> Good luck sweeties! <end camp voice>
A: Bean. amazoncom:B00007AJF7 . Correctly guessed by AntGrad

Snippet: Not funny II

March 12, 2003

1 Comment

*snippet* I thought I had asked for the spam to stop – not for another additional 1,250 (and climbing as I delete them). Noooo….

Guess That Movie: XXXVII: The Asphyx

March 11, 2003

5 Comments

[Guess That Movie Round 37] Yep, it’s time for the executive or action image of Guess That Movie Round 37. Except, it’s got just about in much in relation to executives and action as a monkey being in a tree has to do with the British empire and the fact that every Brit lives in castles near the hanging towers of Babylon….

Ok, now I’ve got that rambling out of the way (Le chat est sur la chaise) and we don’t have to worry about fog covering Alcatraz – you can have a go at guessing which movie the screenshot on the left was taken from. Just try and think which movie it was, and leave a guess with your name (or alias), email address and the movie name and I’ll say if you are right or wrong. By the way – there’s prizes to be won! I spent over $25 dollars on prizes yesterday alone (and hopefully they should have reached the recipients by now), so get guessing!
A: The Asphyx. amazoncom:6305470146 . Correctly guessed by Dr G.