restore

Back in late December the hard drive on my iMac failed... kaput! Disk utility couldn't fix it nor could it erase the drive. It had become a paper weight. Thankfully, I had time machine running for selected files/folders on the iMac (but not the whole system), which allowed me to restore to a new computer in a timely fashion. This week I found myself wanting to reference an article on my blog site and realized it wasn't loading (it was only a local blog at this time). No problem, I went to the time machine backup and pulled the code for the site.

This morning started off okay, until I checked my email and found an alarm ringing about one of our file servers being offline. Luckily, we have a replicated setup, so no customers were affected, but it is a little worrisome not having the safety net of two replicated servers. The server didn't technically crash, rather, it was a problem with the EC2 instance being unavailable likely due to some unforeseen problem in the Virginia datacenter. Regardless, the first step I took was to get the server accessible via SSH.