Over the past few days, I have had several offers of replacement server hardware and drives. The tenacity of this community never ceases to amaze me. I appreciate the support, but currently I’m still focused on trying to resurrect the site data from the previous backup.
Most of the data appears to be intact, but whether or not it’s possible to migrate that information into a fresh Qube environment has not been determined at this point. Replacement hardware isn’t an issue. I can easily drop a new ATA drive into the Qube and reinstall a virgin operating system from the original source disc. I could even add a PCI SCSI card to support an external secondary drive. However, the previous configuration had been updated and patched and tweaked so much over the past several years, that it was only a Cobalt system on the surface.
It may be better to start from scratch.
I am sad to report that the Newted Community site will be offline until further notice. This includes all email accounts and web services. The eight year old Cobalt Qube 2 that served up the Newted Community site suffered a catastrophic hard drive failure sometime this weekend. Until I am able to replace the drive and restore the data to a working state, the site and its services will remain offline.
Here’s hoping that the last backup is actually restorable.
I have notified the NewtonTalk mailing list of this problem. However, I realize that not all users of the Newted Community are on the NewtonTalk list. Unfortunately, I have no way of notifying the other users, as their email addresses are stored only on the dead server.
If you have any questions, please contact me directly.
Grant Hutchinson
Newted Community Handyman