We Have Server Issues, But Not for Long

Well, I should have seen this coming. It looks as though I’ve exhausted all of my bad luck at home, so now it’s time for it to pass on through to our servers. For the past week or two, I’ve been noticing some site slowdown, but I had figured it was just my ISP since my Internet has seemed a little bit slower lately. I found out yesterday that I was wrong, because when your server sends you an SMS (yes, the actual server) saying there’s a problem, you know there’s a problem.

After digging around, it turns out that the second drive in our RAID 1 array failed, and chances are that  it failed weeks ago, as that’s about as long as I’ve been experiencing slowdown issues on the site. Although I complain about the complications of RAID for personal use, it potentially saved the day for us, since if we didn’t have a RAID 1 array and the main OS drive died… well, I don’t need to go on.

Instead of hauling out the dead drive right now and going non-RAID, we’re just going to wait for the replacement drive, which should arrive before the end of the week. That way, we’ll go down once, not twice. As soon as we get the drive, we’ll install it that evening, and I’d expect downtime to be no longer than an hour. I probably won’t have much warning before this happens, but I’ll try to make the process as swift as possible. When the main site goes down, our forums will remain up as they’re on one of our other servers.

Oh, that picture? That’s just an example of what happens when someone messes with one our servers! Well, not really, but it’s the best comparison image I had to a server going down.