Copying old data to new drives takes a long time. Long enough to write silly status pages.
72.1.140.203 IP will remain down until web and dns are ready. Mail should still continue to spool and bounce unless we do something bad and reject it all by accident.
Email is a painful beast. If you've ever felt like switching to hosted GMail (and they dont hate you), it might be a good time to do it. It is free and fairly awesome. Web or DNS access will be needed to verify your ownership.
well, the box IS back up, but nothing is live yet.
For those of you that don't know, gir was hit by a large and sustained DDOS, and that caught the eye of the network security folks at our free (and totally awesome) bandwidth provider. It's bad form to have a busy box running FreeBSD-4.8 on crufty old hardware anyway, so we took the opportunity presented and decided to do some hardware upgrades as well as an overhaul on the software. Unfortunately, this was unplanned downtime, during the middle of snowpocalypse, flooding and holidays. We did finally get our hands on the box yesterday (1/9/2009) and have been scrambling to get things back to working.
Because the box has been down for a while, and there's the possibility that the box was comprimised (it was old and crufty) , we really shouldn't just copy over everyone's data, passwords and apps and just fire it back up. We've got to do an overhaul, and overhauls are sort of a pain in the ass.
To get back on the box, you'll have to contact whoever you got the account from in the first place (probably mattw, ken or richard) and get a new password or do some key exchanging. If you've got some tricky setup that has to work, or some orphaned service you set up and nobody uses anymore we would prefer that you let us know, because when you're doing an overhaul, it's a good time to prune things that dont make sense. We would also like to set things up to be easier to update this time (we did this last time too, but things change and all those plans go bad). WikiFarming, some centralized blog software rather than each user running their own out of date wordpress or..... blosxom. It's not just an OS upgrade. If you're running apps, we're either changing them out from under you or expecting you to change them. Things are going to break. Probably pretty hard.
As always, the big project pages and squeaky wheels get the grease, but things will go up in a semi rational order. Hardware donors get priority (or wheel). Special needs may take time. Pretty much everything is going to take time. In case you weren't aware. The Internet sucks.
Just so you know, the old box was up for 1249 days (3.41 years) and was down for about 3 weeks. That's like 99% uptime. Not bad for cheap hardware, free software and volunteerism.
The old hardware
P4 3Ghz w/1GB of Ram, 520GB of space spread through 4 PATA disks. amazingly, no disk corruption has been seen yet
The new hardware
Dual XEON 2.4Ghz w/4GB of ECC Ram, 1TB mirrored (SATA).
Keeping you in the loop, kind of.
-mattw