Server Outage

As some of you noticed since Sunday at 09:18 Stockholm Time, the server has been mostly offline.
Well the reason why is that since I moved I have a new ISP called ComHem.
Unfortunatly it is the only choice for high speed internet besides ADSL in this house.
The reason I say unfortunatly is that I have heard really bad things about them, and well when I did my research I found that they block several ports such as port 25(Mail), port 80(HTTP) and since a web server needs to have port 80 open for the world to be able to see it, I had to find some kind of solution.

And here in Sweden there is a company called PRQ, some of you might know them as the company that hosted Piratebay back in the days.

Anyway they also have a VPN solution, where you VPN to them and get a anonymous internet connection, but this service can also be used to run a server when your ISP is blocking it, I pay 150kr/month for this.

But this last 2 days it was down, I could traceroute to their internal network, so my end was fine, but after that it just timed out.

I have been trying to reach them several times, both by Mail and by Phone, and only once was I able to speak to them, that was Sunday evening, and they guy explained that they are rebuilding on the site, but no ETA.

What I’m most dissapointed about is that no notification was given prior to this work, and no status during the work, Not even a notice on the website. I also find it rather annoying that as a paying customer my service was down for almost 3 days.

According to my Sitemonitoring the site has been up for very short times, but that it is now stable for some time.
I have still not got a reply on the mail I sent to them, so I have no confirmation that it will stay up, but let’s hope it stays stable.

Give Blood »« Issues with album

Issues with album

I noticed there were some issues with the album not working.
This was because I had changed the URL for the gallery when I moved it.
I have now reverted it back and it should all work again.
Sorry about that.

Server Outage »« Suggestion for server fix?

Suggestion for server fix?

Ok so I have looked around a bit for a replacement for the broken server hardware.

Going for Co-location will be to expensive I think, as I would have to build a completely new server to fit in a server rack cabinet, and pay a rather steep monthly cost.
If I have the server at my house the only monthly cost would be the electricity bill, the server I already have, except it is currently broken.

I Identified it to be a problem with the Motherboard and one of the harddrives, not sure what broke what, but the fact is that one of the drives will spin down all of a sudden and then spin up and make noises repetably, not a good sign.
Also the motherboard will not detect any harddrives connected to the Primary IDE channel, This is the same place the broken harddrive were connected.

Currently in the server there are 3 IDE drives(2x 250GB and 1x 160GB) and 1x SATA(250GB) drive, the drive that is not working is one of the 250GB IDE drives.

Since I bought the two 250GB IDE drives at the same time, and they are of the same brand I don’t trust the second drive to last much longer.
The drives were set up to in a RAID 1, mirroring each other as a safety, this is also why I was able to pull the data off them, and move the pictures to the other server.
However this redundancy is not in place at the moment on the temp server, as i told before I have no ongoing backup on it, I do have a backup of the albums as they looked when i Copied it to the temp server, but anything new added will not be backed up at the moment.

But I have looked around for a new Motherboard that will support most of the hardware I already have to limit the cost of the repair, but also to add some future proofing.
And I found a nice board that has repeated good reviews, and has confirmed support for Linux.
The Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R costs about €100, and supports the current CPU and RAM that I have, as well as future many current CPU’s.

But since one of the IDE drives are failed and the other one is likely to soon fail, I was thinking to add new SATA drives instead, and set up a RAID 5 for a performance boost as well as keep redundancy.
And harddrives are not so expensive now, so I could add some performance and capacity to the server by just replacing the IDE drives with SATA.
Since server is on all the time, I look at server grade harddrives, they usually cost slighly more but in the end they last longer, the previous 250GB SATA drive is a server grade drive, and the MTBF is almost double than a normal drive.
While the IDE drivers were just the cheapest I could find at the time, and he 160GB IDE drives is an old drive I had lying around I use it as boot drive and for the operating system.

I wanted to get Samsung drives since the have good performance, low noise level and usually resonabley priced, also the server grade drives carry a 5 Year warranty.
Unfortuantly I could not find a price or anyone selling the 250GB version, the closest I could find was the 320GB, this one cost €65 and in a Raid5 you need a minimum of 3 drives making a total of €195.

This way I can use the 250GB as a boot drive, and set the 3 drives up in a Raid5.

So there it is, I need about €300 to get the server up and running again, if you are interested in donating towards this, let me know, I will take the Electricity bill, and you get my promise that your site/album will be Green energy, I buy only wind power.

Issues with album »« Falling back.

Falling back.

Ok I have moved everything to the temporary server since WordPress and Gallery dont’ like to be on different servers if you want to integrate them.

But it is working now, Album is up and working, and so is the blog.
If you are hosted on eldaria, and something is not working let me know.

Please do remember however there is no backup or disk redunadancy on this temp server.
Also the hardware is not so new, so it might be slow at times.

But untill I can afford to replace the parts in my real server, this will have to do.

Suggestion for server fix? »« Update on Troubles.

Update on Troubles.

Ok so I have transfered the pictures, it took 2 days.
But they are there now. However it does not work.
I am currently hosting at a provider called Dreamhost.
And not only was it super slow to transfer, but I can not get the album to work.
And I’m 99% sure it has to do with the way they built their servers, it is super slow, and basically the album times out.

So I will for now leave the blog there, but will set up one of my older computers to act as a web server for only the album, unfortunatly it is not so fast hardware, but at least we get the album back online, please note that I have no backup running on this server.
I will try to do this tomorrow, I’m too tired today from work, so will take it a bit easy.

For the future I’m thinking of some different solutions, Since my current server is not working, and I have identified it to be a problem with the mother board and possibly one of the harddrives, there is little I can do now, due to tight finances.
For the hosting in US I pay about USD380 for 2 years, this hosting is expiering in April, and I’m not sure I will renew it, it is too slow, and does not work really good.

Additionally I am paying electricity to keep my home server on 24/7, Now that was not a problem before, since it was included in my rent.
Now it is no longer included, so although electricity is not so expensive in Sweden, and My electricity is Green, I buy from a company that only sells Electricity from Windpower, it is still an extra cost.

So I was thinking of building a new server, and put it in a co-location.
This is more expensive than having a web hosting, but it has a lot of advantages.

First, it is still my own server and I decide what to do with it, how much hardware is in it, etc.
By Co-locating it, it will be in a secure environment and have a high speed link to the internet(Electricity is included).
Cost: about 60 Euro per month + initial cost of building a server that can bo co-located(different casing and cooling system).

Other option is when I have some more money I will just fix the server I have, and put it back online keeping it at my house, it has worked for many years, actually I had a server online since 2001, have a look here: Internet Archive
And according to The site monitoring service That I signed up for back in 2005 I have an average uptime of 97.835% since June 2005. Pretty good I think.
Cost: Some electricity, not sure how much actually, have not calculated how much it uses. + some Hardware to fix it up.

Well for now and until april I think we can survive with the temporary solution.
Let me know what you think, in the comments, or by mail, msn, Pigeons, smoke signals.

Falling back. »« Troubles troubles.

Troubles troubles.

You might have noticed that Eldaria has been offline for some time.

It has been one thing after the other.
But now I’m fed up, and I don’t want to spend time on it now, so for now I have moved the site to an external hosting provider.
If it works, It might even stay there.
The Albums are still down, it takes quite a wile to transfer such an amount of data, (15GB), Originally it reported 63 Hours, but since I already had some of it there, it should be less.

Anyway, it is late and I want to sleep.

Update on Troubles. »« Spotify