ambrosia.melon.org will be down for maintenance tomorrow (Wed., Oct. 3) morning between 9am and 3pm EDT to have its disks all rearranged and the OS completely reinstalled. Actual downtime is expected to be a few hours, as I don’t have a spare server to pick up the slack while this happens.

ambrosia.melon.org will be down for a short while in the next week or so while some new disk is installed and set up. Owing to the busy schedule of my *ahem* colo provider (i.e. dancer_flight‘s closet) *cough*, I can’t say for sure when this downtime will happen, but it’ll probably be in the evening and last a couple of hours. During this time melon.org websites will be down and mail to melon.org addresses will be delayed.

There may also be a few brief (<5min) outages leading up to the upgrade.

In order to reduce spam, greylisting was implemented on the melon.org mailserver earlier tonight. During this upgrade, the mailserver was down for about a minute or two (during which time mail to melon.org may have bounced). Also, you should now expect brief delays in the delivery of some of your email to melon.org as the greylisting does its job.

Candy Cane was moved from the Marina to the Club earlier today. My website has been updated to reflect this change.

I have moved Candy Cane back to her Winter mooring. My website has been updated to reflect this.

i am now married, and adequately recovered from wedding-fatigue to make this post. more information will follow in a later (locked) post.

melon.org mail service is up and running again. things are not yet fully recovered, but look to be almost fully recoverable, and are working well enough to use again.

After much waiting, and fussing over whether or not my motherboard could handle it, i have finally obtained a new 300GB hard drive for use in my mailserver. The data from the failed RAID array has been copied byte-for-byte to a file on the new disk, and filesystem repairs are being attempted on this file (in case hardware problems were causing the previous failure). Hopefully, this will enable data recovery, after which service can be fully restored.

realising that it is merely my mail spool that is hosed, and not my mail delivery software, i have aliased my usual email address to my address at the math department. now i just have to see if the departmental sysadmins try to lynch me for the sudden surge in traffic as all the delayed mail finds its way across their network onto their servers.

The filesystem repair is returning errors. The RAID array upon which the filesystem is now reporting a failed drive (having previously reported no failures). I suspect that the power failure may have caused simultaneous drive failures and one of the other drives isn’t being reported as failed yet either. This would explain some of the corruption I saw within the files (and the arrangement of said corruption) in addition to the problems with the filesystem.

melon.org mail is still not working, and will probably not work again until the weekend. If you have to email me, please send your mail to my mailbox at school: kris@math.utoronto.ca