Maintenance [complete]
Dec 18 2006, 02:19 AMThis is just a heads up in advance warning that sometime today (Monday, Dec 18th) we're going to have a wee bit of downtime.
The reason for the downtime is to install some hardware. There is a second hard drive in the system which I would like to get working. I have been putting it off because I haven't really needed it and I didnt want to take down the server offline to do it.
But my contract with Dell for support expires on the 21st, and I'd like to get this done before that time, where they'll be able to help.
The drive is even hooked up and everything. All I need them to do is explain to me a few things, such as fixing which hard drive it loads on boot up, how to formatit and mount it and perhaps I may need to add it as slave.
It should be minimal downtime maybe 30 minutes, max should be an hour if all goes fine -- this is not a big deal.
Just letting everyone know in advance. I dont have time that I will start it, but I'd like to do it at night if possible or at least a time I see when not a lot are online.
-jcink
Edit:
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As of Dec 19, 2006 at 9:40PM Est this is now all finished
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Dec 18 2006, 02:24 PM
Installing HDDs is baby work :p
What I'd do: Put your jumpers for both drives on cable select. Then just install the slave drive on the connector in the middle part of the cord. Simplest way to do this :)
Dec 18 2006, 02:49 PM
Yes Tru Tru..I would so the same..
Dec 18 2006, 05:27 PM
i don't know anything about this but it sounds hard
Dec 18 2006, 07:30 PM
Okay, but can't you just get another contract with Dell...?
Dec 18 2006, 07:43 PM
I'm not renewing my contract with them for another year. It'll cost me, and so far the past two times this year they have sucked with helping me, so I'm not renewing it. Part of the problem is that I did not purchase an operating system with them (Not spending the $800 or whatever it for Windows Server 2003 ) but if thats how they're going to be well... that's that
Dec 18 2006, 09:13 PM
All it takes is a screw dirver of course with my mussle problems i have to ask my dad but mounting is simple there's evan a bash script that does it for you but i understand why you'd want Dell to hold your hand the first time after that you get the hang of it
Dec 19 2006, 02:46 AM
Some great news - I managed to do it. Dell helped, I see everything clearly now. All I had to do was figure out which was the connector cable thingy, and then reverse the spots on the motherboard. Easier than I thought
And it works. I see the 2nd hard drive now.
And, now I'm working on setting it up... so that way I can use it... but this does not require me to take the system offline anymore. Which means formatting the 2nd hard drive and then just mounting it.
However the guy says I should do a backup before doing this, I think he just doesnt trust me but I'm backing up my stuff anyway. They're two different hard drives... but oh well always good to backup.
I do apologize for the last hour of on/off downtime, but this had to be done.
Dec 19 2006, 02:48 AM
We're also experiencing extremely high loads due to the backups. So the boards may be slow to load a little. They're almost finished, so do not worry.
Dec 19 2006, 03:31 AM
Status: The backups never got fully transfered because while I was doing them, somebody had to go and be an idiot and DDOS me.
Not too sure what THAT was all about.
It was a ton of requests and it would have held up under normal circumstances but the load was bad enough from the backup, that just launched it through the roof.
Boards and stuff are online though now, everything is ok. I'll resume this tomorrow.
Dec 19 2006, 09:41 PM
Drive mounted. Finished. All done.
Dec 20 2006, 12:42 AM
DDOS?? what s that mean??
Dec 20 2006, 12:51 AM
It was actually DoS, not DDoS I think.
DoS means a "Denial of service" attack.
It's where a person floods a server with so many requests in an effort to try to make it buckle under high load and either knock out the SQL server or just make it impossible to get to the site.
It was only about 100 requests, and under normal circumstances that wouldnt have knocked the system offline, but the backups and transfers all created enough of a load already. That just blew the whole thing.
Dec 20 2006, 01:02 AM
oic...i though i'm making problem again coz yerterdays i have sent u a private messages.. lucky is not from me
Dec 20 2006, 01:05 AM
Oh, no, don't worry, I got your message just now, this is nothing you've caused.
Someone else, who is unknown to me right now, clearly took advantage of the fact that I was making system backups, and the high load, and gave it a shot and it worked.
Dec 20 2006, 01:07 AM
so how ur server now??i hope everthing is done..maybe we can check his ip address??
Dec 20 2006, 01:14 AM
Everything's fine now, thanks.
Unfortunately the attack came from all different proxy IPs, so I don't think examining them would help.
Edit: I might install this to my server, we'll see:
http://www.zdziarski.com/projects/mod_evasive/
Looks pretty good for preventing mini attacks like that.
Dec 20 2006, 01:18 AM
well i'm not good in this kind of sotware so i can't give comment
Dec 23 2006, 02:24 PM
How come my site wasnt down? Atleast everytime I got on it it wasnt down...
Dec 23 2006, 02:25 PM
This was at 3:30 in the morning very few people even saw the downtime because of the time that I picked
Dec 23 2006, 02:45 PM
thats a crazy time to do that