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The good, the bad, and the ugly
Jul. 26th, 2007 11:56 pmSo, things with the network are better and worse than I had initially feared. The good news is that I have our email working again, mostly. I still don't have OWA working, but we can get our mail using Outlook, or any IMAP client. Even better, I have the VPN server working, so we have access to all the files on the network from anywhere. Well, all the files that survived the crash that is.
So, as best as I can tell, here is what happened. One of the hard drives on my mail server (which is our file server) too died rather suddenly. There was a log entry a few minutes before it died, and that was it. I don't think I could have save all the data even if I had been sitting in front of the machine when it happened. Strangely, when the drive failed, the drive controller wonked out in such a way that it gets confused and starts telling the computer that it one of the other drives on the system. This seems to change depending on how I look at it or possibly after each reboot or depending on how the drive gets configured on the controller. This made diagnosis 'difficult' and added to the data loss. That was the bad.
The really ugly part is that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
purplerabbit13 has a lot of writing on the drive that died, much of it which is either not backed up or the backups are messed up or are not recent enough. She has been writing SO much lately and I have not been keeping up on the network the way I wanted. I fixed some things a few months back and I kept saying I wanted to virtualize the mail server, but I didn't get it done in time. Fate has a way of kicking me like that. Or, as Neil Gaiman says, “He had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.” Boy howdy. Well I am running another pass with the dister recovery software. Hopefully I will be able to pull more data from the mostly defunct drive.
Wish me luck, or some such.
So, as best as I can tell, here is what happened. One of the hard drives on my mail server (which is our file server) too died rather suddenly. There was a log entry a few minutes before it died, and that was it. I don't think I could have save all the data even if I had been sitting in front of the machine when it happened. Strangely, when the drive failed, the drive controller wonked out in such a way that it gets confused and starts telling the computer that it one of the other drives on the system. This seems to change depending on how I look at it or possibly after each reboot or depending on how the drive gets configured on the controller. This made diagnosis 'difficult' and added to the data loss. That was the bad.
The really ugly part is that
purplerabbit13 has a lot of writing on the drive that died, much of it which is either not backed up or the backups are messed up or are not recent enough. She has been writing SO much lately and I have not been keeping up on the network the way I wanted. I fixed some things a few months back and I kept saying I wanted to virtualize the mail server, but I didn't get it done in time. Fate has a way of kicking me like that. Or, as Neil Gaiman says, “He had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.” Boy howdy. Well I am running another pass with the dister recovery software. Hopefully I will be able to pull more data from the mostly defunct drive.Wish me luck, or some such.
