Although only the disks were acting particularly funny, the hardware failure appears to be a partial failure of the north bridge. Repairs are not expected to finish before tomorrow afternoon.

Due to failing storage hardware (probably a dying disk controller) the melon.org server has been brought down to minimize data loss. Repairs are planned for this evening. The server will also be physically moved during this outage, cancelling the downtime scheduled on Thursday for the move. Websites and email hosted on the server will be unavailable while repairs are in progress.

A upgrade path is being implemented to replace (or make redundant) aging components. Any overdue upgrades/replacements should be completed by September, allowing the server to run more reliably again.

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.