Boy howdy, that was quite an excessively long break.That'll teach me to patch my servers!
You see, back in late August, I was being a good server admin and making sure all of my servers had the latest patches on them. The last server I updated was my blog server (hosting the web server plus the database that holds my Community Server install as well as a couple of other dynamic websites I host). Unlike all the other server, my old blog server (MARA) failed to reboot.
It turned out that the boot hard drive decided this was a lovely time to express to the world that it had some rather strong doubts about my parentage, whether I wipe my feet adequately when coming indoors, and a bunch of other insulting and sensitive topics.
Like the seasoned expert I am, I took a few minutes to think about how I was going to restore the data. Obviously, this would be a good opportunity to separate the web server and the database server like I'd been planning on doing for, oh, months now. Which would in turn require me to first finish the mail server migration I was in the middle of. Oh, hey, don't forget that it's going to be really tricky to recover certain very necessary data from the failed hard drive; if I was lucky I'd get one shot at it[1], so I'd better make sure it worked the first time. I wanted to make sure I was very clear on what needed to be done before I jumped in, spanners akimbo.
I thought a bit too hard. The whole "one shot to get my database data off a known bad drive" started assuming Olympian proportions. So I did what any sensible admin would do.
Like Jonah, I fled screaming to Ninevah as fast as my legs could take me.
Finally, I convinced my friend Nick (who is a genius with hardware) to come down from his mountain and give me a hand. We pretty quickly got all the relevant data recovered, leaving me to finish up the mail server migration so I could free up the new web server, while building the new database server...
...anyway, it all finally got done, and everything is back up an running. Thanks for your patience[2].
[1] Let's not discuss the backups. Really, why is it that backups fail so damn often? What good are they?
[2] I note that Google has pretty much removed any reference to this blog from searches about me. What's up with that, Google? You said you loved me forever last month!