This blog and Beyond411 are now back up after being taken down by a failing disk. There might still be lingering issues, so please let me know if you spot anything wrong.

This was a pretty good fire drill– several of the sectors on the disk started going bad, including some overlapping database tables, which meant that mysql marked the tables as crashed and was unable to recover them. Since the disk appeared to be on the verge of total failure, I had ServerPronto put in a new primary disk and OS install.

Luckily a combination of backups and surviving sectors retained pretty much everything important… I did temporarily lose some autocompletion data but this can be rebuilt and most folks probably won’t notice. I’ve improved my cron backup jobs to make sure that this is saved in the future.

It was a bit of drag (though still much better than in Windows) having to reinstall the necessary linux services as well as Rails, gems, etc.; I would really like to see future distributions of Linux include an easy to use system snapshot features. That’s one of the big draws of virtualization but it seems even without virtualization this is something that could be provided out of the box. (For all I know someone has created such a system snapshot tool already but it doesn’t seem to built into any distribution.)