Nyx back up
dcy...@my-deja.com
Failures of old hard drives on nyx10 and arachne took
down both the webserver and the login machines last week.
Iris (new server) also suffered a hard drive failure on
an IDE drive that was only a few years old.
Initially, Mike Beaty (former Director) took out some time
between sessions of his class reunion to check on the
status of Iris and Arachne. His report was not good. So
I went down taking with me another hard drive to replace
the old one in nyx10 and an IPX which Trygve Lode(President
and Director of Nyx Net)and Terry Knab (Director and News Administrator)
had set up as a backup name server and another pentium
to take over as newsserver.
Mike was right. Iris and Arachne were in bad shape.
Then the drive on nyx10 went. (Bad week for hard drives.)
I called Trygve at the party of a friend and he told me
to pack up the machines in my car and bring them to him.
So at 10:30 pm Saturday night somewhere in Englewood,
Colorado, Trygve and I swapped a Sparc10 (nyx10), a
Sparc2 (nyx), a Sparc5 (arachne) and a Pentium (iris)
from my car to his. Then he took them home and worked
on them for nearly three days non-stop: recovering data,
formatting new drives, restructuring partitions and
transferring files. He converted all 5 of Nyx10's old
drives to 2 larger new drives. He copied over nyx's
files from its old drive as well to prevent a future outage.
Arachne also was showing memory faults that he could not
isolate so he transferred her to another Sparc5. ("The
machine was changed to protect the data.")
By Wednesday evening Nyx, Nyx10 and Arachne were ready to return
to Boulder. I drove them up and set them up. There were a few bugs
to shake out. The biggest one was that nyx10 kept rebooting
every 10-15 minutes. I spent the night up there trying to unravel
that mystery. Finally Trygve advised me to remove the
second processor which he had installed and which had worked
fine in his house but obviously was not properly aligned
with the Boulder aura. Nyx10 was fine after that.
Arachne required some tweeking but seemd to be serving pages now.
However, Trygve could not get the boot drive in Iris to
even let him in. And when Elie Rosenblum (Mail Administrator)
tried to set up the other machine before the news
software was restored, the boot drive on that machine failed.
(Has everyone in Boulder lost their drive??)
So I had to bring that one back down. News service will
be down a few more days till we solve the mystery of the
corrupting boot drives. But I hope it will be back by next week.
Please make appropriate sacrifices to the SCSI gods and
donations to: Nyx Net, P.O. Box 81586, Boulder, CO 80308
(Nyx Net is a non-profit 501(c)(3) which provides free
public access to the Internet. Volunteers are desperately
need for the Outreach program which distributes computers
to the disadavnated.)
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Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
Tom Hall
Thank you !
(Some day I'll have money, and my 'thank you's will really
mean something :-) )
- Tom Hall