(OT) Mailing list server problems

[Richard Kreiss]

Bill, 

Again thanks for your efforts.

As an aside, one of my clients "built" his own version of a battery backup system.  That doesn't quite describe what he has.  He is an electrical engineer by avocation.  This "battery backup system" consist of 100 UPS level batteries connected to the AC power coming in.  All of the electronics in the warehouse are powered through the configuration.  It is capable of powering everything connected for at least 4 days.  That would be a good thing except that the warehouse would have no lighting and their power lift shipping doors wouldn't work.  The other problem, as you mentioned when it snows, is that roads are impassable.  Or, in their case, once plowed, then impassable as the county does a very bad job of plowing anything other than the main highways.

Oh yes, I had to have them purchase small ABC Smart-ups for their servers as that system doesn't signal anything when out or low on power.  At least the servers are signaled within 15 minutes of the UPS losing power and shutting down properly.

This system was tested during and after Sandy.  They were down for about 3 days although the water never go deeper then 1/2 on the floor of the warehouse.  Everything in the place is off the floor.  

Richard Kreiss

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Filepro-list [mailto:filepro-list-
> bounces+rkreiss=verizon.net at lists.celestial.com] On Behalf Of Bill Campbell via
> Filepro-list
> Sent: Monday, February 13, 2017 1:20 PM
> To: filepro-list at lists.celestial.com
> Subject: (OT) Mailing list server problems
> 
> We had a fairly large snow storm with power outage over the weekend while my
> wife and I were in Arizona.  The power went out in the wee hours of 5 February
> after our nightly backup to our in-house Synology Network Attached Storage
> (NAS).
> 
> The power came back up sometime on Tuesday, although some of our systems
> systems require hands-on to bring them up after a power failure, and my brother
> couldn't get here due to the snow so things had to wait until Carolyn and I got
> home Wednesday morning.  It took me a while to get to the servers as we found
> a tree had fallen across the driveway, landing on another tree on our yard which
> broke its fall so it didn't do too much damage when it hit the garage roof and
> Carolyn's car.  I had to get a chain saw so I could at least uncover her car so she
> could go to work on Thursday.
> 
> The server for our Mailman mailing lists runs in a VMware virtual machine under
> the old free VMware server on a CentOS Linux box.
> That machine hadn't come up clean, and I had to fiddle a bit to get things
> running again.  It wasn't until yesterday afternoon that I figured out that the
> root file system had been corrupted, and mostly disappeared after I booted off a
> Knoppix CD and ran a full 'fsck -f -y' on the root file system with everything in the
> /lost+found directory, largely useless.
> 
> At that point, I removed the /lost+found stuff, ran another fsck, then tried to
> copy the root file system using rsync from the NAS box.  This failed as it said the
> file system was full, even though the 8GB file system should hold less than 5GB.
> I tried again using find and cpio, with the same result.
> 
> When this failed, I restored the VM from a fairly ancient snapshot, used rsync to
> bring it current from the most recent backups from early Sunday morning, and
> things seem OK now.
> 
> The upshot as far as the FilePro list is that messages posted between the time I
> got things up initially Wednesday afternoon, and late yesterday are gone.
> 
> Bill
> --
> INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
> URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
> Voice:          (206) 236-1676  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820
> Fax:            (206) 232-9186  Skype: jwccsllc (206) 855-5792
> 
> Talk is cheap...except when Congress does it. -- Anon
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