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The server failure at cmdrkey.com

It was December 14, 2006. I came to work that morning and sat down with a cup of coffee expecting to check the email that had come in during the night, and everything seemed normal. The cmdrkey.com website was running, the email server was functioning fine just as it has been doing 24 hours a day for the past few years. Then all of a sudden, while accessing a file on the webserver, it quit responding. I waited and still nothing. Hmmm... maybe some heavy downloading is taking place and it's just not responding too well. I glanced at the network hub and didn't see any heavy amount of activity on the LED's. Since the webserver machine resides in the same office where I'm sitting, I took a look over at it and noticed all the error lights were lit up. Something bad has just happened.

As it turns out, the 5 volt section of the power supply had just failed. Most people would think the easy solution would be to just put in a new power supply. Well, not with this particular machine. It's a big computer that weighs over 100 pounds and contains 2 RAID-5 setups comprised of 6 hot-swap SCSI hard drives. It's got 7 fans in it. It makes a lot of noise, blows a lot of air around and has a not so typical 700 watt power supply that you can't just buy anywhere, let alone rob from another computer to get going again.

Well, things weren't a total loss. The site was back up and running in about 5 or 6 hours. I quickly configured up another Linux machine to act as a temporary server to hold the cmdrkey.com site, including store.cmdrkey.com and forum.cmdrkey.com. Without being able to power up the big main server, I couldn't get access to all the data. However, I have learned over the years to play it safe. I have another big server box with 6 big SCSI hard drives that performs a backup on all the computers here every night. So, everything was easily available from the backup server to load onto the new temporary machine.

There are still some things that aren't fully configured such as the search function on the cmdrkey.com site. Also, the "Check Out" section on store.cmdrkey.com hasn't yet been configured to allow sales transactions to be completed. For now, that hasn't bothered me much since I'm a bit behind on filling orders anyway.

Sorry if anyone has been inconvenienced over this. Most people probably didn't even know this happened as most everything appears normal here.

Always keep good backups of your data. I'm glad I did.

-Maurice