Atomic Systems

Ladies and Gents,

My apologies for the lack of updates, this is entirely due to our hosters (They still have the temerity to call themselves that!) not updating us. I attach, in full, their email response to us:

"Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience caused to you.

After extensive investigation we have found that the disk drive has failed on the server which has caused a failure of all sites and mails. Before we replace the drive and reinstall OS we are recovering the data from failed drive and copying it on another safe drive. The drive contains a great deal of data so it will take few hours to recover and copy. We will be replacing with new hardware with higher specification to increase the server performance, and then we will install Operating system and latest Plesk version (unfortunately without FrontPage extensions). As of now there is no ETA because whole process is very time consuming, but we will try to resolve this issue as soon as possible. We ask your cooperation and patience at this time.

We know how important it is for you to keep your website and mails running at all times, but as you can understand it is very unusual to experience such issues on server.

Thanks for your co-operation. We have reinstalled new OS on server now we are installing new version of Plesk. We will try to resolve this issue as soon as possible. We ask your cooperation and patience at this time.

We know how important it is for you to keep your website and mails running at all times, but as you can understand it is very unusual to experience such issues on server. "

As you can see...not very helpful. We're currently designing a new website, with a new host. The old site address will link into it. I'll post further details when it's up and working. My thanks for your patience during this...frankly annoying time.

Tom (DT)

So... they didn't have a RAID array for their primary customer data.

FAIL.

Thanks for the update Tom and I hope it all goes smoothly (and I need to order the DT Mark 1 coaches... )

Ash

So, translated into English, they've upgraded the server OS and had to upgrade Plesk to match and totally screwed it up and have no idea how to fix it

Hope you get your site back up soon.

ashgray wrote:Thanks for the update Tom and I hope it all goes smoothly (and I need to order the DT Mark 1 coaches... )

You can always get them through Steam

Thanks - I realise that, it's just that I'd rather do business through the "organ-grinder", as I'm sure they'd appreciate the extra profits they'd presumably get through direct trade, rather than buying through a third party.

Ash

Kromaatikse wrote:So... they didn't have a RAID array for their primary customer data.

FAIL.

After reading the opening lines of their response this was the very first thing that I said to myself.

Hope it's back up and running by December, I plan to purchase the Class 40 then.

Looking from the past the Digitaltraction site has always seem to suffering random slow downs or be offline and I wonder how much that has been attributed to this host, I think its pretty poor service on there part especially when you consider you are a business and 3rd part developer and require your website both as a base for advertisement and sale point.

I hope everything goes well with the new site and new host and that the problems go away with the new host, thank you for your update in regards to your website, good to hear nothing drastic has happened to the DT team.

Just spotted this update,

Kromaatikse wrote:So... they didn't have a RAID array for their primary customer data.

FAIL.

Quite possible they did...but perhaps the RAID is IDE based and they can't source disks anymore? Thats another scenario...Still it would equal FAIL .

SuperTux wrote: Quite possible they did...but perhaps the RAID is IDE based and they can't source disks anymore? Thats another scenario...Still it would equal FAIL .

IDE disks in an "Enterprise" scenario? That would be a FAIL!

"Enterprise" servers used to use SCSI drives, but in these modern times they are migrating to or now using Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives. IDE HDDs were really only ever used in the home and for office "Workstations", never for a server as they are slow compared to the SCSI type (look up the U320 standard as these were popular before SAS).

We have a simple RAID 1 configuration here for this site, backed by SCSI disks. In fact, since we moved servers to our new home a year or so ago, we've had at least one total hard drive failure - spotted by the ISP in their normal monitoring processes, and repaired without one moment of downtime or lost data - seriously cool, but ultimately what you expect.

Matt.

SuperTux wrote:

Kromaatikse wrote:So... they didn't have a RAID array for their primary customer data.

FAIL.

Quite possible they did...but perhaps the RAID is IDE based and they can't source disks anymore? Thats another scenario...Still it would equal FAIL .

But they would still be able to recover the data from the remaining disk(s), and migrate it to the new server.