NewsForge back up after 12 hours of down time

NewsForge was down for about 12 hours Monday because of a faulty power supply on our main server, but returned about 6 p.m.

The server, which had been rebooting randomly late Sunday, refused to boot up about 6 a.m. Monday, said Jamie McCarthy, head programmer at NewsForge. “It was stuck on fsck, waiting for someone at the console
to tell it what to do,” he said.

Server administrators pressed a quad-Xeon 550 into service, and McCarthy spent most of the day copying files over and configuring it — a complete Slashcode installation.

McCarthy wasn’t sure NewsForge needed the power and size of a Type III server, but it does have multiple backup power supplies. “But it turned out that it helped us again already,” he said. “Around 3 p.m., we had a hell of a scare when one of the hard drives apparently flaked out. But since it’s parity RAID, and since the others are working fine, nothing was corrupted.”

NewsForge began posting news again shortly after 6 p.m. Monday, and our service should be back to normal. We’ll try to catch up on all the Open Source news that happened while we were down.

As always, we welcome readers’ input on everything we do at NewsForge. We apologize for the down time Monday.

— Grant Gross, managing editor
grant@newsforge.com