Some of you may have noticed that my last 2 blog posts have shown up again in your RSS readers (all 2 of you who subscribe). Here's why:
I like to play with technology.... A LOT. As such, I am running all of my servers "virtually" using VMWare and the majority of virtual hard drive storage sits on another box running as an iSCSI target. I chose an open source NAS software called Openfiler as my iSCSI target (another good one is FreeNAS), although, it supports a hell of a lot more than just iSCSI.
The software was working great until a power failure outlasted my UPS battery life. When I booted up the Openfiler server, it reported that my software RAID device (where all of my virtual hard drives are) was corrupt. I messed around in the Openfiler's rPath Linux environment trying to recover my RAID array to no avail*. Luckily, I had a fairly recent Acronis TrueImage backup of all of my virtual servers. I recreated my RAID array, partitioned and restored my virtual servers using the backup. As the backup wasn't very recent, I lost the last 2 blog posts from the database.
In comes Google's cache to the rescue. I did a search for my blog, and was able to recover the lost posts from their cache. Yay!
Moral of the story...BACKUP often. AUTOMATE backups. I'm am now in the process of implementing a SCSI, hardware RAID solution (using 14 - 146GB, Ultra320, 10,000 RPM SCSI drives enclosed in a Dell Powervault 220S array) to host my virtual servers with hardware redundancy and act as storage for my automated backups.
I only hope I can afford my electricity bill...