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Topic Title: Unplanned Downtime (Simple Topic)

Topic starter: System Administrator

Topic started: 05:55:51 5th Aug 2013

Posts: 8 Last post: 21:56:37 7th Aug 2013 by General Stonewall

System Administrator Posted: 05:55:51 5th Aug 2013

Posts: 48

Topics: 50

Location: United States



I'm sorry that I took SkyLords offline - especially just before the end of the round. I apologize even more that it took me almost a full week to find a way to bring it back online.

SkyLords is once again hosted in my bedroom on a dynamic internet connection - I had problems with hotmail email address registrations but never had a problem with ip address reasignment, so that's something. I'll need to look into a more permanent solution at some point; either way, SkyLords is back online :).

Although the round looks pretty well determined, should I give people a day or two before closing it? I recognize that things frequently happen at the last minute, and I took the server down at the second to last minute.


Iiridayn Posted: 06:09:34 5th Aug 2013

Posts: 1643

Topics: 98

Location: United States

Gender: Male



For the technically inclined:

I had installed a system update which changed the bootloader, carelessly at the time intending to get it fixed later. I was obligated to move the server to a new home suddenly, and meanwhile had forgotten about the bootloader problem.

No problem really, just hook the drive up to another linux system and chroot in... except that my primary computer didn't have a functional linux install, due in part to prior hardware issues. So, I logged in to that system, updated it, and broke the bootloader on my main PC... sigh.

Fortunately I had a LiveCD, and was able to resurrect my main system using that, by reinstalling linux a dozen times until I got it right. I then tried the same trick on the SkyLords drive, but ran into some nasty issues. In order to solve them I had to search the internet (extensively as it turned out), so I needed a working GUI.

Since I need Windows for the sake of an obligation to scan things weekly, I tried booting into that, but I'd broken my Windows install in the process of fixing the linux install. Recovering that took several days. (I did a reinstall on top of the broken system to get the Windows boot system working, then tried to restore the previous install on top of the new install - I was stupid though and didn't realize that Windows.old had multiple folders inside of it; the basic plan worked once I figured that out though).

Meanwhile, I started solving problems I'd created with the SkyLords drive; finally got it to boot into an emergency console yesterday but it couldn't find my drive. Fixed that by telling the init ram filesystem to just load every block device driver it knew of instead of just the ones it thought it should need; and it booted with an error on some drive uuid.

Tracked that one down - I hadn't regenerated my /etc/fstab after the last time I'd reformatted the /boot partition.

So - I'm sorry that this took so long (Edit: 5 days, 7 hours, 6 minutes, 11 seconds according to a third party watchdog service) to figure out how to get it running again, but I don't anticipate any significant problems other than hotmail email addresses for the forseeable future :).




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watupdogg Posted: 09:45:36 5th Aug 2013

Posts: 2391

Topics: 346

Location: Portugal

Gender: Male



Glad it's back up, what day would the round end? Is it too much of a stretch to just extend the round end till the end of this month since we are already almost a week into the month?


Simbaa Posted: 10:05:55 5th Aug 2013

Posts: 44

Topics: 1

Location: Lithuania

Gender: Male



I don't agree with you watupdogg


Iiridayn Posted: 10:11:33 5th Aug 2013

Posts: 1643

Topics: 98

Location: United States

Gender: Male



Both of you have fairly obvious reasons for what you want :D. Watupdogg, since you're back on I'll probably run the round scripts tonight (server time). That gives you about the same amount of uptime as you would have otherwise had :D.




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watupdogg Posted: 10:14:24 5th Aug 2013

Posts: 2391

Topics: 346

Location: Portugal

Gender: Male



Fair enough, thanks Iiri


Tom Bomadial Posted: 11:27:07 5th Aug 2013

Posts: 423

Topics: 76

Location: United States

Gender: Male



Thank you, I was beginning to worry!




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Dios Posted: 15:56:52 5th Aug 2013

Posts: 2511

Topics: 165

Location: United Kingdom

Gender: Male



All hands to pumps and turrets for the next few hours then....




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General Stonewall Posted: 21:56:37 7th Aug 2013

Posts: 2187

Topics: 23

Location: Costa Rica

Gender: Male



Aye aye!




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