The last week and a half has been trying to say the least. I have two drives in a RAID 5 go down which basically meant I lost everything. That means all the pictures, blogs, recipes in addition to my company site and all class materials created in the last 5 years. I managed to force one of the RAID drives to come back up long enough for me to copy all data off the drives, get a new server built with new 500GB drives (replacing 200s) and running a 3ware 9550SX raid controller card. As of this very minute the site you’re viewing is now running on the new server. The new machine is a dual Athlon MP 2600+ 4u rackmount server and should do just fine I think. The old server will be rebuilt using 5x 500GB drives and act as my new backup and media server. It will have a live synced version of the websites as well as all data archived so I can retrieve a snapshot anytime I want.

To go along with my extended high-availability scheme I’ve invested in a 1500va battery backup and the Linksys WRT-54G will also be biting the dust. The WRT is a great consumer router but not up to the task of managing commercial web traffic. I was running the ddwrt firmware and my only complaint has been the router locking up every once in a while for no reason. A home user would probably never notice but for business purposes I need more. I have a few 1u mini-ITX rackmount cases laying around and motherboards to match so I think one will be my new router. I have room in the case for one Wireless N card and two nics so that should set me up with an external network, internal network and wifi with firewalls between all.

Now that the site is running again there will be plenty of changes coming up so stay tuned..