Hi all.

A few words on the recent downtime of madwifi.org:

Shortly after the downtime from last weekend (which lasted for about
18-19 hours) the server crashed again. The cause was the same as before:
the disk controller failed to talk to the harddisk, which then led to
all the effects that already have been reported by various users (thanks
for the heads-up!). Remote resets (again) didn't solve this problem.

I decided to replace the disk drive in order to get rid of the supposed
incompatibility of controller and disk. Since the server was still
running on 2.4.22, I also decided to upgrade the kernel at the same time
- which is a bit of work, since several patches have to be applied in
order to support the goodies that this blade server provides.

Another idea was, since the old disk isn't really defect, to try to set
it up for backup purposes. I thought that if this wouldn't work out it
at least wouldn't hurt, but on the other hand it might help to add a bit
more data security. So I spent some time on figuring out possible
scenarios with LVM and Software RAID, until I found out that my server
unfortunately only provides a single IDE channel. (For those who don't
know: a failing disk on an IDE channel most probably also causes trouble
for the other device on the same channel). At that time I decided to
leave the old disk out of the server and work with the new disk only.

Sorry again for the inconveniences, and thanks for all your patience.
I'm quite confident that the new disk will work fine in the server, and
that outages like this one won't be seen again.

Regarding setting up mirrors: some of you already wrote down some very
nice ideas, others offered bandwidth and hardware for setting up a
mirror (thanks!), and I have some additional thoughts on this. But
please let me take a rest during this weekend, I had not much sleep
during the week (mostly caused by the server crash). The outages have
been disturbing, but I believe that it's important to spend some time on
proper plannings. I'll start a thread on this subject (which, by the
way, also includes considerations on the suggested move to a
better-than-sf.net-service).

Bye, Mike

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