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

The speed of the repair halved while I was sleeping, several more hours of downtime seem likely.

Some filesystem corruption appeared to have happened when my server had its failure the other day. The filesystem on which the mailspool resides has been taken down for repair. At the current rate of repair, this should take somewhere between 6 and 7 hours. During this time, all mail to melon.org will bounce. With luck, the repair will go smoothly, and no further downtime will be required.