Tech problems!

This is starting to look bad for me… maybe Dragelet, Sivart & friends are correct about my technical skills 🙁

Basically, I managed to kill the LVM partition of my linux server.  I noticed one of the TLR tarballs had a corrupt inode, so I attempted to do a FSCK of the file system.

Big mistake!  The FSCK killed the ext3 journal, and blatted the root inode… everything now existed in the lost+found directory.

Not a problem I thought, I have a backup… of the database from 4 weeks ago… no file backup of the website though.  🙁

 Time for a bit of lateral thinking… the data I need is still on the LVM, it’s just been orphaned… so all I need to do is copy the important file structures off onto a new system.

Bingo, rename the existing LVM partition (so I don’t accidently blat it!) and create a new XEN linux server.  Mount the LVM partition within the XEN host, and selectively copy what I need over.

The tricky parts were:- 1) Remembering what packages I needed & 2) Importing the raw MySQL database files (otherwise 4 weeks of content was gone!)

Less than three hours later, this site is back up and running!

Tomorrow I’m gonna start looking into setting up a scheduled remote backup 😉

Maybe I should also chase up another HDD and set-up a RAID1 mirror… so many possibilities!

P.S.  The recent update to WordPress 2.1.1 appears to have eliminated all the Apache seg faults, another week of testing to confirm it’s gone, and I may be able to go back to my preferred theme!

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