FINALLY! - SLRgear & Photo of the Day are back online!
By
Dave Etchells
(Saturday, April 15, 2006 - 12:35 EDT)
After much travail, the server hosting the SLRgear and Photo of the Day sites (as well as our digital camera "gallery" shots) is back online.
This took way, way longer than it should have, about the only good thing to say about it is that we're appropriately chastised and much the wiser.
A disk crash took one of our servers offline Tuesday afternoon, and after three full days, our admins finally have it back in service again. For historical reasons (none of them very valid in hindsight), the server in question had a non-RAIDed file system. (RAID stands for "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, a fault-tolerant arrangement of multiple disks that can survive and operate through the failure of any one of them.) As a result, when the main disk drive begain throwing errors at the beginning of the week, the only alternative was to down the box, replace the drive, re-image the OS, and then re-import the applications and databases running on it.
The re-import should have been a quick and relatively painless procedure, but a comedy of errors between our hosting provider and outside admin staff stretched the process into a 3-day ordeal. (The good news though, was that our backup strategy proved sound, so no data was lost at any point of the process.)
Appropriately chastened, we're going to immediately begin working to transition SLRgear, Photo of the Day, and the sample galleries to a more robust, fully-RAIDed system. We expect to have this accomplished within the month, and the only further disruption readers should see will be about an hour of downtime while the DNS system switches over to the new box.
Meanwhile, several days have elapsed without the daily Photo of the Day (POTD) winners being displayed on the POTD site or the Imaging Resource home or news pages. To make up, starting Monday, we'll be displaying two Photos of the Day on our home page, the current one on top, and one of the photos which missed its day in the spotlight below it. We'll notify the prior winners by email of the day that their photo will be appearing, so they can tell their friends and bask in the glory.
Apologies to all who suffered through the inconvenience of having these sites down, and thanks all around for the patience and forebearance shown.
- Dave Etchells & the rest of the IR/SLRgear staff
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