The toman diaries

When your host crashes

søndag, februar 13, 2005

Powertech, the nice firm that hosts the free home.no.net domain, had a serious outage on friday. At first it seemed as if they were having a simple reboot, but as the hours went by I started getting suspicious. First of all, my website wasn't responding. Then their pop3 mail service wasn't responding. Then their FTP server "couldn't change directory to my home" (This ftp server is running on a different system I think, since it is always accessible.)

So something went really wrong, wonder what.. At least ehy have backup. I got all my mail over again to my pop3 yesterday, and it also seemed as though my website was up and running at about 18:00 CET.

I was wrong. - Looking at my log-file, they had actually restored my website from the 27 jan. I got the impression they were going to restore it from a day or so back, since they said that any modifications the last day would not make it. The 27th is quite a few days ago, and unlucky as I was, they had taken the backup while I was modifying some of my php scripts and had therefore gotten a few faulty scripts with them. I didn't see this yesterday since one of the scripts check if I'm me, and if so it doesn't run any of the counters. It was only when I saw my log I realized something was wrong since the I had modified the output format to be less verbose.

Luckily, I've gotten into the habit of running wget -m ftp://my.site.com to make a mirror (eg, backup) of the site every time I make important changes.

So take it from me: Make backups! ;-)