Our FrontPage User accounts have been restored. However there are still a few minor permissions and server extension issues that need to be corrected. We hope to have this worked out today. Once the final adjustments have been made, all users should be able to resume normal publishing activities. I hope to have these adjustments completed within the next few hours.
On July 18th our main web server experienced a hardware failure which caused our boot drives to become corrupted. Restoring the system from these corrupted drives would have been very time consuming, and at the time we were unsure of how bad the damage was. Since we had already been planning for some major upgrades of our hardware and Operating System and related software, we happened to have all the components on hand. We were just 1-2 weeks away from migrating to a much improved system before the crash.
Once the system crashed we decided it was in everyones best interest to assemble the new server machine and install the operating system. We knew this would result in server down time of 1-2 days, but there was no way of telling how long the old server would hold out if we opted to try and fix it, or even if it could be fixed.
Therefore we have placed our new server online and are very happy with the performance it is giving us. Not being able to properly migrate the old system data into the new server before the crash had created some undesirable effects. We had to set up each website from scratch for our clients, including Mastermason.com, and then install all the related software packages. Since our website files were kept on separate drives, no one lost any of their data. However we have not yet finished adding certain features such as PHP and MySql support.
At the present, all of our FTP user accounts and access have been restored. However the main problem we are having is in regards to restoring our FrontPage User accounts and access. There is only one process we know of that can restore the accounts and special care must be taken not to make any mistakes, lest it adversely affect the entire server. In order to do this we first have to restore functionality to the damaged drives so that we can retrieve the FrontPage User Account database. We have been successful in retrieving the data and are now migrating it to a healthy drive so we can prepare the data for migration into the new system. If we are successful, we should have the access restored for our FrontPage users by sometime this weekend.
Should our efforts fail, our only alternative will be to manually re-enter each access account into the new system. We estimate that there are just over 400 user accounts which will need to be restored. This in itself will be very time consuming and tedious. Each of our FrontPage users will need to fill out a form containing their Site Name and the password they would like to use. We will add these as they come in and in the order they are received. We will update this page this Sunday with the form for restoring your access, or announce that we were successful in restoring the original access accounts.
Besides the problem with our FrontPage access, our old mail server will not be able to be installed on the upgraded Operating System. The old mail server was primarily used for proving List servers or Email Mailing Lists. However we can set up new replacement lists on our new mail server which was added in 2003.
We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this is causing our users and beg for your patience while we work at restoring all services and access. If anyone has 'mission critical' updates that need to be done to their sites, we are willing to create an access account for you while our work is in progress. We ask that only those who have an urgent and immediate need for the restoration of their access contact us as it will take time away from our repairing and restoring our services. Anyone who has such a need may make their request by sending me an email with your Site Name and Password to this address: shadow@solarnet.net
For those who are interested, these are some of the upgrades we have added:
Hardware:
We are now running a high performance 64-bit AMD Dual-Opteron CPU motherboard with 2 gigabytes of DDR 400 ram. We plan to add more memory once the dust has settled. The motherboard has architecture which allows for faster processing and data transfers. Our speeds have substantially increased due to this upgrade.
Our Ultra SCSI and IDE drives were replaced with an array of 200 gigabyte SATA II hard rives that have 8 mg cache and provide comparable (if not faster) data transfer rates than our retired SCSI drives. Our storage space has increased 4-fold as a result. We will therefore afford our users up to 100 mb of disk space for their free sites, double over what we were previously allowing.
Before the crash we moved from a business-class DSL line to a T1 line, more than doubling our speed or bandwidth.
Software:
Our previous Operating System was Windows 2000 Advanced Server, with IIS 5 as the main web server software. Our new system was upgraded to Windows 2003 Advanced Server with IIS6 which as a whole offers much improved performance, security and scalability. Our MS SQL database software was upgraded from SQL7 to SQL 2000. We also added Office XP extensions, Microsoft Streaming Media, and Cold Fusion Enterprise Edition.
Our FTP software 'Serv-U' was upgraded to version 6 which offers data compression for faster file transfers.
This has been a very stressful and difficult time, but we are happy that we have finally been able to make these improvements for our users and customers. We only wish that we were able to do this on our terms with a planned migration, rather than under a crisis situation. Once again, we appreciate everyone being patient while we tend to the many details in getting our service restored to 100%.
Fraternally Yours,
~The Staff~
11/13/2005