| The last couple of days have been terribly hot here, reaching 41°C yesterday. Alas, it was way too hot for my home server hard drive, which was already in a baaaad shape. Of course, it died while I was in the process of a much needed system upgrade (in the spirit of this other upgrade). Which is not exactly a good timing. |
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I struggled for 5-6 hours to get the server running, which included, a brand new hard drive (not easy to find on a Sunday afternoon), data recovery, building a custom Linux kernel, and a installing system and services from scratch. I could recover most of the data loss, also a few MySQL tables were totally corrupted.
The web sites are back online (although a bit slower, I still couldn’t figure why). A few services are still borked, including … the SMTP service which was originally the purpose of the upgrade. It should be back online soon, just a couple of tables yet to recover (mostly postfix / amavis / mysql coupling).
Oh … this mess showed that Ubuntu sucks big time as a server distribution when it comes to these difficulties. At least for me. I should have stuck to Debian, which, I believe, is closer to the metal and eases hardware failure diagnosis. Debian’s DVD rescue features saved my (old) ass yet once again.
The good news is: this new HDD is so quiet that I kind barely hear it 🙂