What happened is fairly simple but has taken me some time:
- I've emigrated from the UK to Canada.
- axkit.org was hosted from my Business class DSL line in my house.
- When I moved, I decided to leave everything running in the house (we hadn't sold the house yet) - just a plain DSL line connected to the axkit.org server. I had (badly) assumed this would mean things would keep running indefinitely.
- I had other hosting already arranged, I just needed to find the time to do the installation of all the software there.
- My DSL modem died on the 21st Jan. I didn't know what the problem was because all I saw was loss of connectivity. The only key to the house was with the estate agents (and they're not exactly good at diagnosing hardware problems).
- On Thursday 27th Jan I finally managed to get a friend of mine to go around to the house. He discovered the dead DSL modem.
- Unfortunately he didn't have a monitor or keyboard, so the only way to get the machine to a salvageable place was to rip out the power cord and bring it over to somewhere with internet connectivity (initially his house).
- This caused fsck problems on some disks and meant we had to go into full recovery mode. Thank god for Knoppix!
- On Thursday night I started transferring files off the old box onto the new machine. This has been a VERY slow process, and is very much still in progress.
End result is that I'm getting there, but it's taking time. I have some "odd" errors left to recover from :-)
The new server is hosted in Star Internet's data centre (full generator backup, nice fat pipe to the internet, etc) and is a Dual 1GHz P3 with SCSI disks (previous box was a single 500Mhz P3 home PC with IDE disks). So not only is this a much more stable long term solution, but we should see a nice performance boost for the site too. I can't promise this won't happen again, but I think this is as stable as it can get (the server is right next to Man Utd Football Club's web servers).
Apologies once again - please don't think because of the outage that AxKit is going away! We're here for the long haul.
Matt.
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