Due to some work that is happening to our house (hot water here we come), the electricity supply will need to be turned off at some point. This means that there will be some downtime for this server during the period of Monday 11th - Wednesday 13th.

Unfortunately, I will not actually be here at the time and it is not yet clear when or for how long the downtime needs to occur. It should, however, be a relatively short downtime period; I am not expecting the server to be down the whole three days.

In any case, the machine will be safely powered down before the supply is turned off and will come back up as soon as possible.

UPDATE: In the end, it didn’t need to go down at all! Everything is still running smoothly.

One year ago today I announced that I would be moving my site here over to a new hosting provider. Me.

Therefore, today marks the one year anniversary of this hosting arrangement! I’m very happy I’ve had an opportunity to do this. I have learnt a lot about running a server and all the different things involved with it and doing everything myself gave me complete freedom and control over every aspect of my personal site.

There have been issues along the way, but most of those minor. A brief security scare (which I now am pretty sure was nothing, but it was all reinstalled just to be sure), a hard drive failure and one occasion where my database backups failed for a couple of months without me noticing, to mention a few!

Overall though, I’m really glad I did take the step to self-host. It is undoubtedly more work, but it is rewarding as you get complete control and I have gained very useful experience of doing things on the server end with Linux (or Unix in general).

Sadly, it’s not 365 days uptime, but as of writing the server reports “up 49 days, 3:41″ which I think is pretty good.

Here’s to the server. Hopefully much more service from it to come.

Also before I go, I’d like to thank everyone back last year who updated their links over to the new domain at the time. Your prompt action in taking that step allowed me to climb back up Google with formidable pace!

My server (and subsequently this site) is going to be down tomorrow between 10:00 AM and 1:00 PM GMT, for scheduled maintenance. Basically a clear out the cobwebs (which is scarily literal) job, and the opportunity to double-check that everything hardware-wise is hunky-dory. Also I’ll be doing a couple of special backups so I have even higher levels of redundancy, while I get the opportunity of the server being down.

See you on the other side.

UPDATE: Completed successfully, and I didn’t break anything.

It’s taken me a little while to do some testing and making sure everything is all good - but my personal blog is now upgraded to WordPress 2.3.

WPGet is also upgraded to 0.7 as well - so I’m now actually using the latest version of my own software too!

I always sort of didn’t like mainstream social networks, to put it lightly, and never really wanted to consider using them. As it happens, I need have only had that attitude about MySpace, not the rest of them.

What is my point here? Why has it been so long since the last blog post here? I’ll take those questions in the wrong order. Stuff has been pretty crazy recently - trying to fit in (literally) full-time Vaveo development, trying to keep up a post a day on FOSSwire and lots of other things has been pretty difficult. So this blog kind of comes at the bottom of the stack and never gets all that much attention. I’m sorry - a week between posts isn’t a nice place to be, but it’s all I’ve been able to do recently.

I’m still here though and doing well.

Now, to the point of this post. Well it all started when Chris decided that we may have plans to do a Facebook application for Vaveo. I have no idea whether I’m allowed to say that, but well, I just did. Sorry, Chris.

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The main 40 GB hard drive that powers this server has apparently given up the ghost. Yesterday, I woke up to check the server as normal and it had decided to remount the filesystem read-only, which is never a good sign. After rebooting (and losing my >25 days of uptime ) into my recovery environment, I was able to repair the filesystem, reboot and it worked fine.

Until about 2am this morning, when the same thing apparently happened again.

Unfortunately, that probably means the main drive is dead. There are actually two drives in this server, that 40 GB one and a 160 GB drive which important web server data is mirrored to each night (although which has question marks about stability for running a boot drive).

For now, I’ve copied everything over to the 160 GB drive until I can get a replacement main drive. Thanks to the flexibility of Linux, I simply copied the data over, rebooted off a GRUB CD-ROM, entered the boot commands for the second drive and it booted as if nothing had happened.

Now, I don’t know whether to just get another drive and continue with the current setup or get two SATA drives and try doing some form of RAID. Or do that later. I don’t know.