Subject: IMPORTANT: Friday was a bad day for the BimmerBoard SQL server… Author: davidc (moderator) : member since December, 2003 : 10309 posts Posted on: 2008-06-21 06:19:35

Anyone having withdrawal symptoms? I know I am.

My sincerest apologies to everyone for not being able to get this fixed faster. The SQL server took a hard nosedive sometime Friday afternoon. Of course, this happened on the one day that I was out of town without a laptop, with the unfortunate coincidence that my backup person was also away on a trip. Special thanks to BJames38 (and SDMike) for getting in touch with me by phone about the problems. I have a monitoring system set up to watch for issues, but I didn't get the text messages as I was in a rural area. Just bad luck that everything conspired against us at the worst moment, I guess.

The SQL server has redundant RAID-mirrored drives, which should've protected us, but evidently didn't. I tried to remotely reboot it but kept getting disk errors. At least we have good backups, though they're only run once a day so we did lose some message posts after 1am Friday morning. I'm still working on the data files, so it's possible that I might still recover some data, but as fast as the board moves anything recovered will quickly move to page 2 or 3, etc. -- I'll try though.

I've switched the SQL server duties over to main web server and restored the backup files so that we're back up and running, albeit on a single machine for the time being. It looks like we'll need a couple of new hard drives or perhaps a motherboard. I'd really like to add another server to keep online as a hot standby. It will cost around $1,200 to build a such a server. If you'd like to donate to the cause, your help is appreciated. I'm usually shy about asking for money, but this is one case when I think it's necessary to add some more hardware to help ensure reliability.

Again, it pains me to see the site go down for any time at all, much less an an entire day. Thanks for your patience and, if you ever think the site isn't working, by all means feel free to call me, regardless of the hour.

David Cecil
Lexington, KY
'97 740iL, 166k miles
'92 750iL, 92k miles
'86 735i, 101k miles

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