totheknife.com

Thursday night, our heater ran all night making a few rooms in the house exceptionally hot. One of these rooms houses a server computer that acts as domain controller and DNS server for the network, as well as router for traffic on half the network that uses the DSL. This server is essential to a few game servers I host for others. When it goes down, players cannot connect. As many of the players have donated money and hardware over the years, I feel it is important to have as close to 100% uptime as humanly possible with what limited resources we have. Most often putting money in myself.

This server computer suffered a complete freeze as a result of the heat and the internal temperature sensor being broken prevented the overtemp auto-shutdown from operating. While I've gotten the computer back up and running, some damage appears to have occurred. This has been causing the computer to randomly shutdown and restart for the last few days.

Parts have been ordered to replace the server, however until they arrive and the new hardware is fully in place, I may have to drop out suddenly to take care of an outage. It already happened during last night's practice twice, though the second time I fixed it while playing. As I do this hosting for a community of 50+ players, fixing this server when it goes down takes precedence. It wont prevent me from playing or being at practice, but I wanted to give a heads up ahead of time that I may have to drop out from time to time.

NP, Fox real world is always more important than gaming. If you have to drop suddenly we will save your spot till you return. Thanks for the heads up though.

The saga continues, but is almost over.

Last night around midnight EST, the server previously mentioned went down again. This time the NTFS filesystem shattered like Humpty Dumpty falling off that damned wall. Pulled the hard drive and connected it to my PC. Hours and hours of Check Disk, imaging the disk to a newer SATA hard drive, and more hours of Check Disk before finally getting a result.

The entire drive was imaged off the old 40 GB PATA hard drive and is now on a 160 GB SATA hard drive. This enabled me to continue working on the files without Windows freaking out constantly and MORE errors cropping up. Yes, the 40 GB is dying and caused this mess . The good news is that I managed to retrieve the Windows product key (since the original discs and packaging have disappeared over the years) from what turned out to be a severely corrupted registry. I also managed to retrieve all files we wanted to save from the old OS.

Unfortunately, the OS on that drive is toast. One of the many orphaned files Check Disk found was the OS kernel itself. I couldn't hope to put all the random eggshells back together to get that to boot again, even if I had a good registry backup to work with. But the new hardware arrives tomorrow regardless, and I can probably find ISOs online, since I recovered my key.

What does this mean for me? Well I've been gone for nearly 24 hours when I told a couple of you I'd be on today. For that I apologize. It also means I likely wont be on except to chat until Thursday at the earliest. I had to run some services on my personal computer to take over the job of that now dead server. This means MWO wont run smoothly enough to not be frustrating.

Give me a poke in TeamSpeak if you need anything, but I wont be dropping until I get these services off my computer.

Man. Letting us know is definitely appreciated, but do what you need to do, and we'll catch up in the fullness of time.

The hardware is here. Still working on proper ISOs. My key is useless without install media.

I'm hoping to be done with this by midnight tonight at the latest.

Almost there. Hardware is running, haven't finished install and configuration yet. Had to sleep some time.

Regardless of the state of that computer, I will be shutting down services that were moved temporarily to my computer so that I can attend tonight's practice. Though I ought to have that other computer good to go for running those services by then anyway.