The server went down again sometime last night due to the ongoing hard drive problems.  I'm going to order another hard drive (400GB Western Digital) tomorrow afternoon and will be rebuilding the server early next week.  I've got everything backed up just in case the server asplodes before then, so don't worry about losing anything.

-b0b
(...apologizes for the downtime.)

I was without knowledge of your guys' opinions and going ons for almost 12 hours!

X

I usually just drive home during lunch to reboot the server, but I was rather busy at work today and didn't have the time.

-b0b
(...shrugs.)

We probably don't tell you this enough, Bob...but speaking only for myself, although I am sure I could speak for everyone on here...I greatly appreciate what you do to allow us to keep in contact.  Spending money on parts, keeping everything ship shape, and everything else you do...it is greatly appreciated by me.  Thank you.

X

2nded. If you need donations from us or anything, don't hesitate to speak up so Wes and Spanky can refuse you outright.

Hey I got clothes and ho's to pay for....I ain't got time to give b0b money so I can talk to you losers every day!

Request denied!

Bu seriously, it is pretty cool of you b0b.

nah, bob blows


Give him money?  Doesn't that make him a whore?

...just saying

Honestly, the server isn't really all that expensive to maintain.  It gets all the hand-me-downs from the Bobulator, which are typically more than enough for a server that is only running a website, a mail server, and some file sharing.  The only hardware I seem to spend money on are hard drives.  The server seems to kill off at least one hard drive a year, which is getting pretty old!

The last time I rebuilt the server was in October 2005, when I bought some new components for it instead of passing everything down from the Bobulator.  It's still running on an Athlon XP 3000+ (2.1GHz) with 2GB of PC3200 and three hard drives (120GB System, 250GB FTP #1, 200GB FTP #2).  At the moment, all three drives are packed full.

I ordered a 400GB hard drive which should be here Tuesday.  That will work as a temporary system drive to replace the faulty one.  My goal is to order three more 400GB drives when I rebuild the Bobulator next spring, then move my hardcore RAID adapter to the server and place them in a RAID 5 array.  That should provide about 1.2TB of storage, which is less than I used to have, but more than I probably need right now.

-b0b
(...is excited about the rebuild.)

I'm going to pop the new drive into the server tonight to begin copying over files.  The server should be back up and running by 11:00pm.  It will likely be very sluggish throughout tomorrow, though, as the data transfer takes place.  My apologies!

-b0b
(...rolls up his sleeves.)

The new drive is installed and is currently in the process of being formatted and encrypted.  Since this is a full format and encryption sequence, it'll probably take 3-4 hours to complete.  This will cause the server to be a bit laggy until it has finished.

Tomorrow morning, I'll begin transferring files from the old drive to the new one.  This will be a bit precarious since I'll be at work and unable to manually reboot the server if the old drive craps out again.  This process will also induce some sluggishness as I move ~400GB of data over a nasty old IDE card to the new drive.

After I get home from work tomorrow, I'll swap out the old drive and put the other FTP drive back in and continue to transfer data.  Expect a half hour of downtime starting around 6:00pm.

-b0b
(...wishes he could afford a real server with SCSI drives.)

The files are moving now, hence the lag.

-b0b
(...thinks lag sucks.)

The forum will be down one last time (hopefully) this evening.  I'm going to pull the old hard drive and put the second FTP drive back in, and we should be golden!

-b0b
(...w00t.)

Alright, everything has been reassembled and appears to be working.  The server is running a heck of a lot smoother now than it has for months.

Since I swapped tons of data around, everything is fairly fragmented at the moment.  I'm defragging the system drive overnight and will get the other two drives under way tomorrow morning, so expect more lag until it's done.

-b0b
(...has another hard drive to shoot now.)