e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics

Back in Business!

November 23rd, 2008

Okay, that was interesting — after a catastrophic hardware failure at our ISP and a couple of days of problems with the site, epolitics.com is back up and running at full steam. Thursday morning, I suddenly stopped getting any messages sent to an epolitics.com email address — things got awful quiet for a while. Then I noticed that the site was unavailable. Turns out that the server had cratered:

In this case the irony is that the device that failed was a (rather expensive) RAID controller, so the problem was caused by a device specifically designed to prevent what happened. We’re working with the vendor to figure out why this happened — I think we’re going to wind up retiring all of the servers of that model as a precaution.

That from Heller Information Services head Paul Heller, who clearly had a couple of bad days there. By that afternoon, email was being routed properly, and the site came back up in crippled form on Friday. Restoring the Wordpress database from a backup (the db got corrupted in the crash) took until Saturday, but now we’re back in action. And Heller’s giving everyone affected two weeks’ free hosting, which helps make up for the unexpected vacation. Ah, technology — you are both friend and frustration.

Update: Oops, spoke too soon — the comments disappeared again. Should be back shortly Are back up now.

– cpd

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