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Classiccmp.org & Bitsavers.org - both down?

Lorne

Veteran Member
Joined
Jul 27, 2008
Messages
1,164
Location
Chandler, AZ, USA
Is it just my connection or are Classiccmp.org and Bitsaver.org both down?
(I've been trying for the past three days)
 
classiccmp.org is indeed down--I haven't received any cctalk email for the last few days. Bitsavers is down, but I use the Stuttgart University mirror routinely anyway.
 
I wondered why my email has dropped significantly. :)

Also, I sent a post about my Profile drive to the lisalist@googlegroups.com. a few days ago. That hasn't shown up either although I'm sure the two are not related.

Tez
 
Seems like an issue with their hosting provider or server. Both of my traceroutes stop at accessus.net. I didn't realize they were the same IP for both systems at first. So likely a server issue.
 
Amazingly dead

Amazingly dead

Bitsavers and classiccmp have both been stone dead here since 5AM or so on the 9th. They both route to the address that translates back to "huey.classiccmp.org", so I'm guessing that's what's down.

I'm surprised there hasn't been more hue and cry, and that the downtime has been so long.

Vince
 
Anyone here contact them yet? I feel like they're probably drowning in emails about it but if someone wants to post a reply or status it'd be good. I'm hoping the emails they use on list aren't routed through that server.
 
I can tell you recovering a dead router or server is no fun. Rebuiding a server and all of the programming, users, ... ug. Makes me shudder. I spend x hours a week preparing for this kind of thing. God speed.
 
I read a poorly translated german page that said that the hard drives had failed on the server. No idea if it's accurate or not. I think there is just one server that I'm not sure is even in a real colo or anything. There were posts asking for people to donate hardware a while back and I think they got some little server and a couple hard drives to upgrade. I know I will get hate for it but, the classiccmp server needs to get out of the hands of the vintage guys and into standard hosting situation. Nice little vm that never stops working. There are some things the 22 year old guys fresh out of school can do better than guys that could wirewrap a pdp 8 backplane blindfolded. Web hosting probably being high on the list.
 
Instead of reading poorly translated German pages, here a couple of direct posts about the hardware and hosting environment from 1 year ago and 3 years ago. I didn't trim these down and the posts are verbatim as I received them on the list:

From: Jay West <jwest@classiccmp.org>
Date: Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 6:35 AM
Subject: classiccmp server hardware
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk@classiccmp.org>


A few of you might have noticed some recent problems with the classiccmp server ;)

The machine has six 300gb hard drives. Two are PATA, and set up as a mirror that contains just the OS and mailing list. The remaining four are sata and set up as a zfs raidz pool.

One of the two drives in the OS mirror failed. That did not cause downtime of course, but I noticed it when the other failure occured.

One of the drives in the raidz set (websites, user data, etc.) also failed. Because it's raidz, that shouldn't have caused a problem. However, it marked the raidz set as failed and wouldn't mount it, saying there was not enough drives left in the set. I can only guess this was a bug in zfs on that system.

Thanks to hard work from Ryan, the machine is back up. Basically he pulled dd images of the remaining drives in the zfs set, imported them into zfs on one of his machines and the data re-appeared. A two drive mirror was set up on the remaining working drives and then all the data copied back. This took a few days due to the volume of data and network links. I thought that was the end of the problems. But no......

Once the machine was back up, someone said websites were up but no mailing list (I had verified that it was back up after the data re-import). Checking again, now the last drive in the OS mirror is having read errors and is probably going to fail soon. No other systems in our datacenter are having issues like this, so I suspect it's not power related.

Long story short, the machine is back up, all website/user data is restored, and there's no loss of data. However, I can't be sure it will stay up with an OS hard drive mirror set where one drive is dead and the remaining drive is having lots of read errors.

My plan is to go buy six new sata drives for the server, probably 1tb's, plus a 4 port sata controller. I'd prefer to buy the drives new rather than take drives as donations just due to the above issues and time constraints. I found some seagate sata3 1tb 32mb cache drives for $60 each plus tax. Adaptec 1420sa controller is about $90, so the total is about $450. If anyone cares to donate to help cover the purchase, paypal jwest@classiccmp.org

Now I just have to find another machine to move the list & web content off to, rebuild the classiccmp server, and move everything back :)

Jay



From: Jay West <jwest@classiccmp.org>
Date: Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 3:01 PM
Subject: Re: classiccmp server hardware
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk@classiccmp.org>


Thanks to lots of generous donors, the hard drives & controller for classiccmp server are covered. Six 1tb 7200rpm 32mb cache sata 3gb drives, plus an adaptec 1420sa controller. I'm backing all the data off to external HD's, then I'll start planning the server upgrade. Thanks folks!

J


From: Jay West <jwest@classiccmp.org>
Date: Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 7:35 PM
Subject: LIST ADMIN
To: cctalk@classiccmp.org


Greetings Folks!

As many of you noticed almost a year ago, we started having issues with the classiccmp server. Some of these were hardware issues, some software, etc.

Due to the extreme generosity of Al Kossow, a new server was recently provided for the list. It is a very nice 2U dual cpu 2.2ghz opteron with 4gb ram, dual gigabit ethernet, and six 300gb hot swap ata drives. Two of the drives are mirrored (gmirror) and hold the OS (freebsd 7.1) & software. Of the remaining drives, 3 are in a zfs raid5 pool and one drive is a hot spare. These drives hold the websites, ftp sites, mailing list data, etc.

Over the past few weeks I've been working to migrate all the classiccmp-related websites that I host on the server to the new machine. Last I did the classiccmp.org website (which means the archives were unavailable for a week or two as they existed {and were still being updated} on the old server). A day or two later I migrated the archives and finally yesterday - the list itself. To the best of my knowledge, all should be up and running well. There is *STILL* a problem with the htdig indexing of the lists. I am going to finally dedicate some time to researching that. I've been putting it off for eons because I've mostly forgotten everything I used to know about HtDig. I still have to do a little work to get metrics back up, unfortunately my favorite tool (mod_watch {interfaced with cacti}) is no longer supported so I may be looking for a new tool along those lines to implement. If you have suggestions, please email me off-list, I don't want to start a long off-topic discussion of modern hosting tools.

I would like to post a list of all the classiccmp-related websites, ftp sites, etc. that are lurking on the server, as I suspect some are not commonly known. Everyone who has things hosted on the classiccmp server is aware of it - so if you object to me posting your URL please email me within the next few days and let me know and I'll omit your site.

I'd like to take this time to re-iterate my offer to host any classic computer related websites, ftpsites, mailing lists, wiki's, blogs, etc. at no charge. I don't want to run the site, I just provide free hosting and bandwidth - the site is still yours. The server is in a world class datacenter with serious bandwidth - not on a DSL line in a basement or anything :) Along those lines, several people recently asked to move their classic computing sites to the server and I asked them to wait till the new server was up. We have gobs of free disk and the machine is reliable now, so re-contact me and we'll get it up and running.

My classiccmp email address got to a half gig, it will be a long, long time before I skim through it. However, I have put it into a different mailbox so I can definitely see any new emails to my classiccmp address and will keep on top of those. Or attempt to :)

I am trying to get back to things classiccmp related - as well as actively reading the list again instead of just watching the server. I departed for a while due mostly to classiccmplist-burnout and "work stuff". The work stuff has mostly settled down, and I find myself very much wanting to dig back into my beloved DG's, HP's, and yes, even the DEC's </troll> My last acquisition was an excellent Data General Dasher D200 terminal, which will look awesome sitting next to the Eclipse S/130. Next project is to make room for a metric boatload of 800/1200 DG minis and get them here instead of storage.

Glad to see all the familiar faces, as well as some new ones. Best regards,

Jay West
 
I read a poorly translated german page that said that the hard drives had failed on the server. No idea if it's accurate or not. I think there is just one server that I'm not sure is even in a real colo or anything. There were posts asking for people to donate hardware a while back and I think they got some little server and a couple hard drives to upgrade. I know I will get hate for it but, the classiccmp server needs to get out of the hands of the vintage guys and into standard hosting situation. Nice little vm that never stops working. There are some things the 22 year old guys fresh out of school can do better than guys that could wirewrap a pdp 8 backplane blindfolded. Web hosting probably being high on the list.

It is my impression Mr. West owns the ISP the server is using, a normal hosting service would cost some money because of all the traffic and space (multiple people using the same server).
 
Instead of reading poorly translated German pages, here a couple of direct posts about the hardware and hosting environment from 1 year ago and 3 years ago. I didn't trim these down and the posts are verbatim as I received them on the list:

I was actually talking about the current outage not the equipment upgrade. The German post was about why it is currently down.
 
Ah, good to know - thanks!. Hopefully it will be fixed soon. I miss my daily fix of "classiccmp mix". :)
 
From my perspective Jay is doing an amazing job of serving our hobby with his time, money and effort. I truly feel for the guy when he experiences these issues...

I've donated to the cause once or twice in the past. It's a good cause. :)
 
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