Wow, that was ugly! 

What happened:

What was ugly, Nadim?  Well, everything.  On Friday afternoon, the server’s operating system (as a Windows proponent, let me just mention it’s a Linux distribution *evil*) gave out completely after little pieces of the system had flickered into and out of operability over the morning.  A complete reinstall of the server and its software became necessary.  Three questions actuated immediately:

1) How do you back up data from an inoperable system?

2) How do you store backups efficiently without having physical access to a server to burn them on DVDs?

3) How stable and contiguous would backups of an inoperable system be?

Well, finding answers to these questions was painful and took quite a long time.  Hence, the five-day downtime.  Now that everything’s been backed up successfully (after days of hitting dead ends and a work-related, high-priority system restore of a Linux server that was gruesomly hacked into little pieces), I’m starting to bring elements of the Krimson News server online again bit by bit.  If you find anything I list as working below that doesn’t work correctly, please send me an e-mail at nadim@crimsonjazztrio.com .

What’s working right now:

News site, WordPress dashboard, diaries and forums.

What’s going to work in a little while:

E-mail (SMTP/POP/IMAP).

Apologies:

Sincere apologies that it’s taken this long for anything on this site to get back up.  I hope it is understandable that neither Jeff nor I were able to work full-time on this reinstall project–we’re both people who need to work for a living.  Over the course of Wednesday, I will revive the remaining pieces of Krimson News as I find time.  Please keep watching the status updates in this news post (immediately above this paragraph) to see what is and isn’t working.

We’re going to implement a pretty cool and new backup methodology (Cleversafe Dispersed Storage) to schedule dispersed and versioned snapshots of all elements of this site and its operating system so a long downtime such as this won’t happen again.

Again, sorry that Krimson News has been down so long, but rest assured we’re working on keeping you up-to-date with news and podcasts consistently from now on.

Cheers!

Nadim S. Haque
Krimson News Chief Engineer

License

This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.