Folding stats sigs

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I've just noticed my server hosting the Folding stats sigs I host is dead.
A disk read error has occured.
Press Ctrl + Alt + Del to reboot
was the greeting I got when I plugged a monitor in.

I'm going to try fixing the current disk but if that fails I will have to reformat and rebuild the software setup. I should have it all fixed by tomorrow morning at the latest. I'd better do anyway 'cus it wasn't just Folding sigs on there :p

Reason for posting is just to let people who use the sigs know what's happening.

A frustrated null :(
 
Disk is looking like an EMP bomb hit it. Recovery doesn't seem to be working, I think I'm gonna end up going for a full reinstall. Problem is I don't have a spare hard drive and can't afford a new one so will end up reusing this POS :eek:

In the mean time, I have setup my laptop as a temporary server and redirected the traffic to it, so the sigs are working again.
 
It's nothing special really, just standard desktop kit. The drive that's failed is a Maxtor 40gB. This isn't the first time I've had this happen though, back in October 05 I think it was, I had a Maxtor 60gB in it which failed. I didn't keep back-ups at the time either :eek: Suffice to say I will not be buying Maxtor again. The only reason I put another Maxtor in was because it was lying around spare so I saved some money.

I learnt my lesson though and managed to recover the data :)

I actually have more than enough drives in my main rig so could move one into the server, except they are all SATA and it only has IDE.
 
Mikey1280 said:
Has something gone wrong again null?
Yes and no.

Despite being on holiday from school now, I've been going in this week running the lights on the junior school play. I took my laptop with me yesterday and on Tuesday and will probably be doing the same again tonight (this is the last night). This is for two reasons:
a) Before the play starts I'm also working on a robot I'm making for a competition this Saturday, laptop is needed for programming and making the documentation.
b) Once I can't do any more of that I need entertainment before the play starts, laptop provides this (overhauling my website slowly over the summer, rewriting the backend navigation code when away from home - and therefore forum distractions).

lay-z-boy said:
Thats what you said last time god'dammit.

Hold on, does that mean you wont be buying from any company that something goes wrong with?
Sorry? I know it is, that's what I said in my above post:
I learnt my lesson though and managed to recover the data
That was referring to last time hence 'I learnt' as opposed to 'I have learnt' which I would use if referring to this time. Aside from that I haven't managed to recover the data this time anyway so couldn't be talking about it (only incentive for recovering data is log analysis to see when it happened). And the whole "I learnt my lesson" bit was referring to the keeping of back-ups, not the choice of drive manufacturer. Though it is true to say that in future I will be avoiding Maxtor because I've had *two* drives fail incase you didn't realise. Also you've got a few punctuation mistakes in your post, it should be "That's" not "Thats" and "g'dammit" not "god'dammit'. The apostrophe represents missing letters and there were none in your spelling so it wasn't necessary. Oh dear oh dear oh dear I'm pedantic today. Ignore me.

Right with that out the way here's the bit you are more likely interested in; the server status. A friend of mine donated me a new hard disk on Monday, Western Digital Caviar SE 40gB 5400rpm IDE. Which is the exact disk I would have bought if I had to buy a replacement I think. Great, I thought when I got it, should be back up and running in no time. How wrong I was. Upon connecting the disk up and starting the Windows installer the problem became apparent. At the 'Windows installer is detecting hardware' stage, the screen went blank and never came back. Thinking it was most likely a drive issue despite having a new one, I tried every possible combination of drive configurations (primaries, secondaries, masters and slaves) with the CD-ROM and new hard disk. All of them caused the same problem. I then tried disconnecting the new hard drive and loading the installer. It loaded perfectly, except for the slight problem that I couldn't do anything with no disk connected. And that's where I left it. I was out all of Tuesday and Wednesday so couldn't do any further work.

On another different but related topic I've taken some of the downtime as an opportunity to install better cooling so if/when I get it working again I will hopefully be installing FAH on it (never did before because the CPU heat caused everything else to heat up too - particularly the hard drive - yet it still died with the CPU idle).

As for how I'm going to get it working yet I'm not sure. I'm worried of buying a new drive incase it turns out to be a motherboard fault and then I'll have wasted money and still won't have fixed it. To further the problem I'm away from home for about 2 weeks as of Saturday morning (though will be coming back for the night at two points) so I need a solution pretty quickly, and it's gotta be one that is stable for two weeks at least. I may well end up biting the bullet and installing a Linux distro on it to see if the installer gets any further. Slight problem is that I have very little Linux experience in general. Right now, I'm going to have my breakfast then do some reading about SME server.

Hope this explain things, null :)
 
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Possible yes, thank you :)

However I'm really hoping it will be fixed by the time I go out this afternoon, and infact from the Folding sigs point of view everything's Ok aside from the possible downtime tonight if I don't have it fixed (due to taking laptop out). After that though the laptop will probably be staying at home for the two weeks I'm out so even if I don't get it fixed the sigs will carry on working.

Problem with rehosting (as opposed to me internally redirecting traffic on my network) is that it would mean waiting for DNS changes to go through or you having to edit everyone's sigs to point to the new location, which I think of as 'messy', dunno why :o

Thanks for the offer though, will see how things go this afternoon :)

Likelihood is though that even if I do get SME server running I will be changing it once I'm back from my two weeks simply because I think I would prefer a full OS to tinker around with, just for a bit of learning.
 
Well I didn't fix it yesterday afternoon, was too busy with other things (last night of school play amongst other things)

However I had a flash of inspiration when I got back in the evening and wondered if I could run the Windows installer in a different machine, from within XP, and have it copy the files over. It didn't let me but while the drive was in there (the WD 40gB I had troubles with) I thought I might as well format it (it still had a Clark Connect install from my friend having used it). Put it back in the server and the Windows installer ran perfectly. Must be a bit naff to have been crashed by unknown formats, also strange because I've never seen that happen before.

Anywho once that was done it was all pretty uneventful, I got it almost completely finished by 4am this morning ( :o ). So it should all be running smoothly now though there may be the odd reboot if I'm still updating things.

Later on in the holidays I hope to do some work on the Folding sigs to enable use of custom background/font/control of what info to display and positions etc.
 
I've been away from home since the beginning of the weekend and shall be away until next Thursday, except for last Sunday night when I returned home to sleep. Likewise I am at home right now for the same reason. As such I haven't been able to do any work on signatures. I really do want to but simply can't.
(Did my D of E expedition last weekend followed by going to Cardiff university on Monday 'till today, and now my parents are forcing me to go on the scout summer camp against my own will :( )

Due to the level of customisation I hope to enable with the second generation, I'm considering a very basic user system, the reason being to simplify the URLs - instead of every parameter being specified in the URL, they would be looked up in a database and just the username would be in the URL. What do people think of this?

Hopefully I can start developement when I'm back, though I will only have one week before going away for another two weeks so don't know if I can have it all done before then.
 
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