Monochromatic

z3bra, the stripes apart

I'm back up !

05 August, 2014

In the past few days, my whole server (and thus, my website) was down.

Everything is now back to it's normal state, so I'll give you a quick explanation about what happened.

TL;DR

Quickly, here's what happenned (the whole process took approximately 2 weeks):

  1. Changed distribution
  2. Changed hardware
  3. Realised new hardware is broken
  4. Bought new hard drive
  5. Fallback to old hardware
  6. Reinstalled distribution

I'm sorry

As you can imagine, I did not plan such a long downtime. It was, at first, only a matter of 2 or 3 days, but ended up being almost 2 weeks. So first of all, please accept my apologizes.

The situation

Now, let me tell you what happened. Some relatives gave me an old PC they were not using anymore. It had a dual core and 2GB of RAM !!

So I decided it was time for my old server to retire a bit, and by the time, to change the distribution powering it. I settled on alpinelinux, a fairly light and fast distribution powered by musl libc and busybox.

The install went fine and I brought the server online again. And then, it began...

The problem

─── ssh z3bra.org

         __   __
       /'__`\/\ \
 ____ /\_\L\ \ \ \____  _ __   __
/\_ ,`\/_/_\_<\ \ '__`\/\`'__/'__`\
\/_/  /_/\ \L\ \ \ \L\ \ \ \/\ \L\.\_
  /\____\ \____/\ \_,__/\ \_\ \__/.\_\
  \/____/\/___/  \/___/  \/_/\/__/\/_/

                        -- silly, isn't it ?

Enter passphrase for key '/home/z3bra/.ssh/z3bra.org':
─ g ── cd ~/src/www/monochromatic
─ g ── vim last.txt
─ g ── make
/bin/sh: /usr/bin/markdown: I/O error

OooOh god, what happened...?

I'd better shut it off before it goes bad...

─ g ── sudo poweroff
/bin/sh: /usr/bin/sudo: I/O error
─ g ── su -c poweroff
/bin/sh: /usr/bin/su: I/O error

.. Too late ...

By the time, I was not sure wether the problem came from the hard drive itself, or the whole mother board.
I decided to boot the drive from my old server, and I did not have any problem from it. Looks like I could only rely on my good ol' hardware.

The solution

I finally decided to buy a new hard drive, and to run it from my old hardware. The motherboard of the "new" one was on the end of its life, and having all my data on an USB external drive was a bit of a pain in the neck. It boots slowly, and if I'm not careful, I can just kick it and loose all my datas.

I finally reinstalled alpine on the new hard drive, and finally brought the server back up !

It feels good to be online !