After a nightmare forty-plus hours, MacDailyNews is back online. Pipes breaking, drives failing, files corrupting… You name it, it’s happened. We won’t bore you with the details (as we can’t bear to relive them in print anyway), but the result is that the last 3 months of articles (most of them) will not be available for awhile as we rebuild, but we are back online and new articles are coming now. Luckily, all of this waited until after the Macworld Expo Keynote and is straightened out in time for Apple’s earnings announcement tomorrow.
Thank you for visiting and for your patience!
Man, First the Fat Boys break up, now THIS!
I was going through withdrawl the last few days with out you guys! Welcome back!
glad to have ya back. ~huggles~
Don’t ever do that again! I was breaking out in sweats, shaking, and I was very irritable! I did get some work done though. Welcome back.
We missed you guys.. No MDN=no news.
If you area now fixing things so could you remove those emoticons from this site? They are not mac combatible.
Welcome back!
It was like having my right arm amputated.
Glad you’re back. Now that HP this morning has basically said Thurrott is a liar, we needed you back so we’d have a place to do some bashing. :>
First Spymac was down..then you guys. I actually got some work done yesterday:)
WB MDN. Missed’ya
it’s a good thing i usually save a couple of articles from MDN to read when i’m offline because yesterday would have been totally boring. WELCOME BACK!
That was really wierd. I found myself visitng sites I haven’t been to in ages. Glad to have you with us again.
WELCOME BACK!!!!
Damnit! It!
Don’t ever do that again!
Well, at least I can blow out the damned candles that I was lighting….
Ummm… does MDN use Apple’s Xserve? If not, why not? What do you use and why?
Hey good point, Aryugaetu
MacDailyNews… Please tell us about your hardware. We are interested in what happened – only for the lessons we can learn.
Great to have you back. (And I’m going to back up my stuff right now!)
WOO HOO! Nice to have you back!
MacDailyNews, unfortunately, does not use Apple’s Xserve (as of yet). MacDailyNews began as an MGI-based site running Mac OS 9/WebStar on a shared server and quickly graduated to Mac OS X/Apache. After a brief stint on a dedicated PowerMac G4/450 (not a server, just a regular Mac off the rack with a 7200RPM ATA drive), again using Mac OS X/Apache, MDN was forced to move to a dedicated server due to high traffic. The site currently is running on FreeBSD 4.8/Apache because this was the best way to ensure we could serve our growing traffic within our operating budget at this time. Our next goal is clearly to get our own dedicated Apple Xserve G5 running Mac OS X/Apache.
You can see some of MDN’s server history and information here:
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=macdailynews.com
MacDailyNews has never run on a Windows OS and would rather shut down operations than stoop to such a level.
What happened on Sunday around 5:30pm EST was a water pipe burst above the data center and the fire department cut power to the building in such a way as to cause the server’s power supply to burn out which also conveniently damaged the hard drive at the same time. We are in the process of attempting to reclaim the databases from this hard drive and then throwing it as far into the Atlantic as we can after first setting fire to it and beating it with a sledgehammer. The data center people are exploring how to prevent such problems in the future.
Kinda makes my PB’s HD failures seem childish!
Thank you for the reply, MDN. Now, THAT was news!
Ah, sweet schadenfreude!
Wow, that’s a heck of a story, kinda of like watchng that old mouse trap game. Good luck on that data recovery! Anyone out there have a lot of money? But MDN an Xserve!
We could start a fund. I would contribute a few Pounds.
Although reading through your explanation again, you really need a new UPS and some form of backup solution before anything else.
I’m not intending to pour salt on your server wounds, but a daily backup stored offsite would have greatly reduced the impact of the water pipe event. You would still have faced the need for some new server hardware, but you wouldn’t have had a problem with trying to recover three months of articles.
I haven’t had withdrawals that bad since Tom Leykis left L.A.