Server Problems
Around 8pm tonight I noticed that my primary server at Rackspace was not online. Well, it was still pinging, but that was about it. I logged into my.rackspace and created a ticket for an emergency reboot (something I’ve only had to do twice in the 3+ years this machine has been online). Around 45 minutes later the machine was still not back online. This is not typical Rackspace support, but I know exactly what had happened. My account was marked as a “Racker Server” account a while back, even though I pay the full montly price for it and not the discounted employee rate. So I figured that someone saw this ticket come in for a Racker server and it wasn’t a high priority. Anyway, I called in and as it turns out they were working on it, but the secondary hard drive in the machine had died, and in the process of rebooting the BIOS was not recognizing the primary master drive. Grrrrreat. So I call up DCOps and let them know that I am coming to the datacenter to work on it myself. I got there around 9:30 and they already had the machine on a bench waiting for me. After changing out drives and putting a new proc fan in there, I started the process of repairing the filesystem to try to recover some of the data on the bad drive. 3+ hours later I finally finish and silver was ready to go back into the datacenter.
Tomorrow I have to migrate data off the bad drive on to the new one and schedule time for the bad drive to be taken out of the machine. I felt pretty confident that I could fix just about anything that could have been wrong tonight, so it could have been worse. Anyway, it was a good reminder of how comfortable I am with Linux. Even though I don’t use it for a desktop anymore, Linux feels more natural to me than any other OS, Mac OS X included.
It;s almost 2am here and I am exhausted, so I’m heading to bed.