Where did everybody go?
Wondering where Mark Pilgrim, Sam Ruby, and quite a few other blogs have gotten to lately? Me too, until I finally remembered that Michal Wallace (the owner of Cornerhost, who hosts them) has an offsite status blog. Apparently the folks whose hosting he resells prohibit (retroactively?) reselling shell accounts, and just shut him off. He’s in the process of moving to the widely praised Rackspace.
Good news: I checked the archive for the Cornerhost customers-only mailing list, and at 5 pm Eastern Michal posted that Rackspace had given him the new machines, and it would take him ”a few hours” to get them up and running as Cornerhost servers.
Bad news: Possibly no backups. Ouch. This is me quickly learning how to use rsync.
Yeah, that ”My policy has always been that users are responsible for backing up their own data.” bit? Exactly the sort of thing I would pay attention to once, maybe twice, and then forget about. I’m absolutely terrible about backups.
I have backups of my scripts, weblog, and stories, current as of 2003-04-26 @ 00:00.
Undoubtably, I will find something I wish I had included…but I should have the bulk of my site.
With any luck, Michal will be able to to negotiate the release of my and Mark’s data…
Funny thing was Cornerhost is originally on Rackspace, but he was moving some stuff from Rackspace to Server Beach. Some of us are luckily hosted on mercury, which is still at Rackspace.
Ah, that’s why you’re still around. I thought I remembered you being on Cornerhost. And Server Beach being a sort of Rackspace spinoff puts a sort of different spin on things, doesn’t it?
I have a complete backup from 2/27/2003 (when we moved to Server Beach), and a complete DB backup (was always on a different machine). I lost several private projects that were in unlinked subdirectories, and I don’t know what else. And I’ll be onsite at a client for the next few days, so I’ll have no time to rebuild.
Oh, shit. Surely once it gets to be Monday, someone sensible at Server Beach will at least let Michal grab a backup from the machines there, but the lack of any guarantee is still unnerving.
And of course I should learn from this, and be backing up my own stuff right now, but even tgz’ed, 320MB sucked down through my dialup straw is an ugly prospect.
Email me in the next hour at f8dy at yahoo dot com and I’ll download it myself, burn it onto CD, and mail it to you. One-time offer.
That’s an incredibly kind offer, but once I actually tried it, I can get it myself: only 14MB zipped, which I won’t do as often as I should, but is still quite tolerable. Apparently gzip thinks I repeat myself a lot, so I’m really compressible.
320MB? Zipped up, mine is 3.5MB.
Ee-yep. I’ve only got twenty-some-odd MB plus the database, and I’m not looking forward to it at all at all.
I’m guessing that includes my mp3s. You don’t have to have those backed up, you know. I’ve got that covered. ;)
320MB unzipped, 14MB zipped, too much repetition. He said, repeating an early comment ;)
But, yes, 320MB. There’s more to me than meets the eye, since I actually blog with MT, b2, Drupal, pMachine, Radio, Blogger, BBT, Mombo, and Vellum as the mood strikes. Okay, not BBT, since I’ve probably forgotten the login if Russ hasn’t deleted my account by now, but the blog’s still here. Plus that does includes /shannon/, since even if I knew how to say tar cvf /home/philor/philringnalda.com but not /shannon/, I wouldn’t. Sure, she and I both have copies of everything there, but there’s no sense in doing a backup that includes everything except the most valuable things on the server.
D’oh. Make that 320MB, 14MB when only some of it is zipped into a damaged .tgz. Given my usual lack of backup care, it’s a wonder I even looked at it enough to notice.
Ah, the joys of being self-hosted.
If Retrospect for MacOSX weren’t such a piece of *#%@, I would be more smug about my ”nightly” backups. (They’re nightly when the daemon doesn’t die, which is pretty … umh … regularly.)
Michal had only his premium users and a few high-volume sites at ServerBeach. Luckily for PapaScott, it falls into neither category, and is still at RackSpace, since I don’t have a backup. :-/
Hey, thanks for getting the word out.
Yes, going without backups was a horribly lame policy. It was actually on my plate for things
to finally do this month. :/ (and still is, right after ”get everyone moved over”)
Still no word from them, but I’m hoping
someone will be around tomorrow. The machines
are marked ”suspended” – not ”terminated”, so
maybe there’s hope.
-Michal
And thanks for not pointing out that while chanting to myself ”without an e, without an e” so I wouldn’t mess up your name, I called you Michal Sabren. Company, alias, person, email address, they’re all the same to me.
Michal just sent out the word… the ServerBeach servers are back online.
Uhm. Let me get this straight: serverbeach shut down the machines because they noticed heavy traffic with very much different machines on port 80?
Are they insane, or are they just complete morons? ”It seems they are looking for open proxies on port 80” (snarfed from the statusblog) – might it not just occur to serverbeach that they are just using plain and simple HTTP? This definitely is one of the weirdest reasons for server shutdown I ever read :-)
Okok, I crawl back under my (selfhosted, with backups) bridge now. Just ignore me giggling over this for a while …
It does rather have the feeling of something that could only happen on a weekend, when everyone goes on vacation and leaves just ”The New Guy” behind to watch the shop, doesn’t it? Shell account or not, I ”start spewing port scans on port 80” from PHP all the time.