Major breakdown on Cactus-Mall web server

[bcss]

At approximately 4pm this afternoon the Cactus-Mall server went down. They tell me both SSD drives in the server failed simultaneously (sounds improbable). This affects about 100 cactus related websites including some highly used ones but not BCSS related sites which are hosted on a different server. It will also render quite a lot of email systems to fail. This is going to be very difficult and laborious to fix.

[bcss]

Further advice on Cactus-mall server breakdown. Fasthosts engineers are looking into how to restore services but solutions may take some time. Meanwhile if you you need to contact Suzanne or Tony Mace please use bcss@bcss.org.uk which is mostly still working. Mail to cactus-mall.com, paperweight-mall.com. mesemb.org.uk, asclepiad-international.org will not get through.

[bcss]

I have set up temporary solutions for the following:

www.mesemb.org
www.asclepiad-international.org

Suzanne is now contactable at msg@mesemb.org or treasurer@asclepiad-international.org.

We are still working on the main server problem.

[bcss]

A server rebuild is currently underway. This is taking longer than expected. Once this is complete all the backed up data (over 1Tb) will have to be copied back to the server before website restoration can commence.

[bcss]

The server operating system has finally been restored by Fasthosts this morning at 8.30am. It has taken fractionally under 2 days after various glitches in the restore system. I have access to the system. We now have to restore all the backed up data to the main drives. Likely to take about 8 hours, after that we can start restoring websites and other services.

[bcss]

I am afraid the file restores have gone very wrong. Files corrupted. Big setback. Yann Cochard and I working on it.

[Tony R]

Apologies too, to the Haworthia Society members who are currently unable to access their website http://www.haworthia.org/

[bcss]

The file corruptions from yesterday evening have been fixed. There are still some configuration errors to be resolved but I hope we will see some sites restored tomorrow.

[bcss]

Quite a number of sites are now back on line. There are still residual problems assicaited with mysql logons and php include files, we hope to have most of these fixes during the next 24 hours.

[bcss]

Most of the problems I am aware of have been cleared up. However I sure there may be some I have missed. At this point I would welcome an error reports (and you can now use cacti@cacti-mall.com again).