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…the site’s been down for the past couple of days. I managed to put up a maintenance message for a good part of time, but for those who missed it, the server had a hardware issue that required some emergency maintenance. The short story is that the hard drive was failing. To make matters worse, the RAID-1 mirrored drive that’s supposed to have me covered in this situation actually failed back in July without my knowledge, which left the site running on a single faulty drive that needed to be backed up and swapped out immediately so that both drives could be replaced.
With the help of Mentar and his friend Fruit, I managed to get a full up-to-date backup of the site, so nothing was lost — not even a single comment — unlike the crash we had back in the day on Aniblogger. It took me longer than I would’ve liked to reconfigure the server with a new Debian (Squeeze) distro, but everything should be up and running now. I expect there to be some hiccups, so please let me know if you encounter any issues (performance or otherwise). Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Note: Expect a flurry of posts to be published, as the writers have been staying on top of things during the downtime.
Don’t worry, we’ve had Guild Wars 2 and MoP to keep us busy in the meantime. Glad everything worked out fine. I expected some drama, but its nice to not have it for a change. 🙂
Speaking of which, I didn’t get to play GW2 very much because of this… -__-;
You know what this means, everyone must power level Divine.
Lol. I feel for you. But I identify; I must be the only person who pre-purchased the game months ago and forwent every beta weekend and early access, forgetting about the game altogether until I saw people talking about it on release day. Things happen, RL business gets in the way-, etc… ；_・
Divine has a GW2 account? Now I’m actually interested in playing GW2.
Nooooo!!
Even in the comment section, I’m getting tortured with the word GW2!
*Sulks and goes to the corner and plant mushrooms*
The down time really scared me since I thought you guys were closing the site down. This is my favorite anime blog site and it is one that I share with my friends and family so I am glad to hear that this site is back up.
Props to you, Divine! Needed my daily does of RandomC. 😀
Even a day without Random Curiosity can cause major withdrawal symptoms such as an urge to discuss anime with anything resembling a humanoid, the impulse to write down various comments on yourselves in permanent markers and/or the violent crave for various anime opinions from a ‘Divine’ source.
I’m so happy you guys are back 🙂
To Divine and the rest of the bloggers:
I want to sincerely thank you all for contributing your precious time and energy in keeping the site alive and running for all us anime enthusiasts out there. A great deal of the shows I watch depends on the feedbacks by the RC community. The debates and discussions here are always enjoyable to participate and I really appreciate how respectful (most of the time) the RC community are towards other’s opinions, even though they may not necessarily agree with it.
I’ve been with RC since 2008 and I’m damn proud to call myself a member of RC. Stay strong and I’m looking forward to y’all future works!
Right onnn. We do this for peeps like ya! 😀
Ahem* Got too giddy there, heh.
But yeah now that I’ve calmed down a bit, here’s something with a more serious tune.
First off, thanks for that comment, really. If there’s one thing that keeps us going, it’s knowing that well, we’re making our own small difference so to speak. And to see you guys come in, day in day out, reading our posts, keeping the site alive, returning so quickly after the site’s been restored… we can’t ask for any better viewers than the ones we already have here for the most part. So in that context, we should actually be thanking you guys more than anything, because without you guys, there would be no site, and no real purpose in writing all of the posts we do… well aside from the enjoyment and w/e, but you know what I mean. So yeah, I know we say this a lot, especially in the podcasts recently, but I don’t think it’s something we can emphasize enough, so thank you. Thanks for all your support, your comments, your best wishes. And hopefully you’ll stick with us for years and years to come!
thanks for everyone’s hard work getting the site going again.
It’s good to have Random Curiosity back! Thanks for all the hard work :).
I needed stilts to tell me what the heck is going on with Horizon, GO STILTS GO!
Crap, I thought I had more time!!
*scrambles to finish his post* Don’t kill meeeee~!
Went to RC for Horizon post. RC back up, but no Horizon.
NOOOO!!!!
Very cool that everything managed to be saved.
Don´t worry about it man, you alredy do way too much for us by running this site. Thank you for your hard work and long live Random Curiosity!!!.
Thank goodness you had me turning Blue (in at least two senses of the word) here. Keep up the sterling work folks. I truly appreciate it.
So, you going to come back now Divine? 😉
Kidding!
Don’t say kidding! =O If he takes you seriously, he might come back 😉
Glad you’re back.
Glad the sites finally back online. Waiting expectantly for all the backlogged reviews, hoping they’ll be coming in fast and furious, especially for Horizon. I want to make sense of last weeks episode and soon as possible, so Stilts, no pressure ehh? 😀
We love you oh Mentar and Mentar’s friend Fruit, oh unsung heroes we will sadly probably never see in person to thank for your efforts!
“Because they’re the heroes RC deserves, and the ones it needs right now… and so we’ll hunt down blown up hard drives and servers because we can. Because they’re true heroes. They’re silent guardians, watchful protectors of our technological foundations…dark knights!”
The thanks for Divine is presumed. 😛
That makes no sense. That implies we should hate Divine but he does his job for us anyway.
We all love Divine and worship him whenever he posts.
Lol I don’t know where you’re getting that feeling from, but uhh, okay.
The implication was it’s obvious the site needs Divine to get up in the end, so the thanks is implied, especially coming from a staff member. Also, it was a bit of messing around on part as well with the “:P” added on. Thus, something not meant to be taken nearly as seriously as you did.
What I was trying to point out was my appreciation for Mentar and Fruit, who don’t usually come here to assist, did so anyway, but probably won’t get as much appreciation, which isn’t right imo.
Awesome!
Yay! I was getting a little worried about the outage (I don’t know where the server is located and there is a tropical storm/hurricane bearing down on parts of the US right now) so I’m glad it was just a hardware problem, and everyone’s fine (…or I hope everyone is, I don’t know how many RC contributors live in the Gulf area. If there are, hope you guys are doing okay! >_<)
Wait, there’s a tropical storm in the gulf? I live by the gulf! Oh shi–!
(Note: I’ll be fine. I’m out of the path ^^)
She lives!. ‘grats on getting everything revived Divine~ And many thanks to all the others involved in the recovery efforts >D!. Now to catch up on all those reviews written while the site was down :D!.
Welcome back!!!, you guys had me worried.
welcome back! the mentions from Stilts on twitter was that it might take up to a week for RC to be back. thank you for bringing it back much earlier than expected. now i can get daily RC dose.
Normally, it would have taken a week. But with Divine on the job? Well… ^__^
Way to go, boss. You the man!
Stilts, Divine is a robot. Maintenance is nothing to him. 😀
I bet Divine used his PARALLEL COMPILE to finish everything.
Just glad to have the site back up ^^
Are you sure none of the comments were lost? Because I had submitted two comments in the SAO 8 thread, the second being sent JUST before the damn site crashed.
Now both comments are gone and I have to retype them from memory.
And why am I being given 4 downvotes just for making an observation about why my posts have gone missing? What is wrong with you people?
Look here, you downvoters, it’s not like I’m criticizing Divine or the site or anything, I’m merely objectively pointing out a problem!
I genuinely don’t understand how that should warrant so many downvotes!
I have said it once and I will continue saying it as long as it continues to be a problem: This voting system needs to be modified, if not scrapped altogether, as people can’t post in peace without being discouraged by suddenly getting downvoted for no particular reason.
Maybe, JUST maybe they like to screw with you? Seriously, you’re the only non-troll I’ve seen that goes ballistic over downvotes. Just ignore them, its not like they ruin your life or anything.
frag85, I’m not one to complain about people disagreeing with what I say in episode threads, but I find it extremely befuddling that they could “disagree” with something as neutral as an error report, that’s what ticks me.
So forget it, to those downvoters who downvoted me on this senseless issue: FUCK YOU.
I can think of no other reason besides you guys having some ax to grind with me and trying to “troll” me by making me upset about it. So go ahead. Downvote away. I won’t be coming back to this thread.
Or, y’know, it could be that since we haven’t learned to digitalize inflections, your written observation sounds like petty whining; to me, it honestly does
especially given the extra work Divine pulled to restore the years worth of data. Particularly, this phrase “..the second being sent JUST before the damn site crashed” coupled with your closing sentence. The caps on ‘just’ and the adjective ‘damn’ added, while probably placed as a harmless exaggeration on your part, easily changes the perceived mood of your statement.Though if it makes you feel any better, I’m sure a couple of bandwagon members did jump in as soon as they saw a downvote. “Hurr, hurr~! Down with the whiner~!” and all that~
On a final, less-serious
(an exaggeration)note… the “trolls” have overcome you! You just got lynched by anonymous downvoters! Nyahahahaha~!Just my thoughts o/
Hmm, a comment or two may have slipped through before the first maintenance message was put up. It looks better if I pretend they didn’t though. >_>
Gasp! What is this? Divine revealing that he is human just like all of us? What sorcery!
Seriously though, I wouldn’t mind if comments got deleted while bringing this site back to life so long as all the posts return. I’ve been using this site as reference for old (and sometimes new) anime that I missed before picking them up.
That you managed to restore most of everyone’s comments is very commendable. Thank you for what was likely a monster of
unpaidwork!Glad to see the site Back ON
It’s always good to hear from Divine. Go play some GW2 now, yo!
As you’ve probably noticed…It was a secret ploy by several writers so they can get more game time in GW2.
PS: I’m joking.
That’s probably it!!!
🙂
Two plans were set here.
1.) To play GW2 while the site is down.
2.) To bring back Divine.
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Hey Divine just a suggestion, you might want to build a RAID-1 of three drives for that extra security. 🙂
That would be RAID-5 then. Too pricey for a dedicated server that only runs one site. \
Ah no, I meant the 3rd drive will be used as hot spare for the RAID-1 (avoiding the tax on parity calculations when in RAID-5). It’s pricey but a good investment especially for hosting one of the most popular anime blog sites out there 🙂
Back in the day when I was a sever admin. I hated raid-1 so much grrr. Just my two cents. Load OS in a raid 1 (for fast performance) and mount a raid-5 (for data storage with a hot spare) not the best performance but really worth the peace of mind. YEs they are expensive. Let’s open a donation fund to get one. I’m willing to donate since I was so depressed during the down time I thought I’ll die!!!
There’s so many of us here that come for our anime fix that it should worth a try.
What is GW2? Anyone to tell me what is that?
It’s an MMO called Guild Wars 2 that came out recently.
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/
Well I am just glad that the site is back up again
Good to have you guys back online
Whew! Glad everything is alright! I was also getting worried since this is one of my main sites that I read frequently since the very beginning (2004?). Technical difficulties is never fun though. It’s also annoying when the preventative plan you have set in place failed without your knowledge while you continue to go on with your life believing that if anything happens, there’s backup. Anyways yah!
That’s a relief, I thought it was hackers or something. Glad to have you back! ^_^
Ooooo i’m just glad the site is back up.
Was expecting things get much more worse!
Good job! Many thanks to the selfless hardwork of Divine and whoever involved. =D
I was involved!
I gave many encouraging words and inspiration speeches =) And I stayed up late to listen to all the complaints and difficulties of setting up the server =P
Erm… Good job? Yay! XD
YAY!!!
Who here was checking the site twice or three times a day to see if it came back on? I know I was. When it first went down the first thought I had was actually if a hd drive crashed or something, biggest reason for that was because if the site was going to go down I’m sure divine or someone else woulda have let us know. I’ve been an RC fan since the days if omni and I hope that this site keeps on living for a long time. Thank you to all the bloggers for having the same interests in anime that we also have.
Oh… Thanks for come back!
I’m not seeing this site often, but kind of lonely without this site around 🙂
Good to see you guys back!
I just realized how much I rely on RandomC for my day-to-day fix. Checking MyAnimeList everyday was a poor, poor substitute.
Random-C-ism ho!
Had a similar issue at my job where we had a server that running a RAID 5 with Hotspare. Two out of four drives failed…since 2009. Nobody knew and the we found out by accident because of an another issue on the box. Double HD failures suck!!!
RAID6 – only used after hindsight = 20/20 🙁 (or hold/cold spares with solid backups)
I’m so glad you guys are back ^^ I was sooooo sad when I saw that it was down and I kept coming back every hour that I was awake to see if it had come back up.
Welcome back. \(^.^)/
Great to see the site back up again!
Life is somewhat incomplete w/o a daily dose of RandomC.
And Dual HD failures sucks big time!
Welcome back~
And thank you everyone for the hard work in getting back the site. 🙂
I was thinking that this site will be vanished when it went on maintenance
And there i was thinking this was all a server backup in preparation for the upcoming naruto chapter fallout…
Welcome back guys.! My standard browsing pattern was totally out of sync without you…
Leave it to Divine to sort things out so quickly! I have to say, I’m impressed- I’ve seen these things happen to other sites and it took them over a week to recover.
Glad to hear Random Curiosity is back online. What’s all the excitement about Guild Wars 2? (this man left MMORPGS a long time ago; SAO is the only thing I’m into that’s MMO-related)
Very happy to see that RandomC is back on track, it really gave me a scare >.< I've been relying on RC for so many years now that I don't even remember how it was before I knew about it!!
OOOMMMGGGG RC right into my veins….how I have missed you.
Im glad everything is back up and running. T_T (tears of joy)
I’m glad you’re back and nothing was lost. 🙂
Three cheers for RC!
Like Dr. Frankestein would say: It’s alive… ALIIIIVEEEE! XD
Love this site to much that I penta-check it every day. We’re rooting for all of you, guys! ;D
Was literally refreshing this page every few mins since it went down…
glad to see you guys back up.. was worried about what happened to the site when it was down
Sweet – welcome back! Downtime gave me the opportunity to catch up on a few of your recent podcasts I had sitting around. Glad all is backed-up and restored with the world! 😀
Good to hear from you after a while. Bad was the occasion. Still great you managed it without having anything lost.
oh yeah RC is Back 😀 nice….well I am off to keep playing GW2 after I finish my shift and go jogging with my father
Yay it’s back! I’ve been having serious withdral symptoms from lack of RC posts :S
Seriously though glad to see this site is back up and running after such a close call :O
Yay ^^ I’m glad you guys are back…I missed my dose of blogposts!! Thanks for the hard work, minna-san 😉
For now….read all the posts!! 😀
Phew. Glad that’s over.
It’s good to see Random Curiosity back. This blog has been my source for reviews for years, and many series that I’ve watched I have watched solely because an episode review here made it sound interesting. I also love to see the reviews of series I am already watching, to see what you folks’ expert eyes may have noticed in an episode that I did not, or just to see if you can better articulate your feelings on an episode than I can.
It was disconcerting to ahve the site down for a few days like this, but given the nature of the problem it is quite a pleasant surprise that you managed to get it back up and running so quickly, and without any data loss. Thank you for all your hard work, and I hope all of you can keep this blog going for quite some time yet to come.
Can you bring “site map” back ? It’s help me so much when I looked for old anime as from 2008-
Site map fixed. It took a couple of days of debugging but I finally found the bug that WordPress 3.4 introduced.
We’ve missed you RandomC. Okaeri and thanks Divine-kun!
Glad that everything is back and running again. Let’s just hope it won’t ditter you from doing your awesome job ^^
Keep up the great work you guys !
Sounds like a crisis averted…I’d perhaps be willing to contribute towards the purchase of new hardware for you guys – wouldn’t want my favorite blog dying on me…
Thank you for all of your hard work Divine and co. 🙂
No worries Divine. If it meant keeping Random Curiosity running, going on maintenance mode is just fine. Thanks for all the hard work.
Even you backup failed? Wow, that must have been crazy then. I wish I had a RAID setup.
I’ve got a number of servers with RAID setups (mostly RADI-1) running Centos 6, and they’re all set up to email me when something bad happens to the RAID setup. I’ve never used Debian before, so I don’t know for sure, but I imagine there’s some kind of system that can be set up to notify you via email in the event that the RAID goes bad.
Also, gnome-disk-utility should be available for Debian Squeeze (and is probably installed by default), and it allows you to connect remotely to a server and check on the status of it’s drives and RAID configs. It’s a really useful utility to have around. You can start it from the command line by executing “palimpsest”.
Probably on my end but my desktop cant show RandomC’s home page says “It Works! This is the default web page for this server. The web server software is running but no content has been added, yet.” Then on my laptop the whole site is back to normal. Maybe a bug or something?
Seriously. Look how many people love RandomC! You guys rock!
So THT wht happen lol. Well I spend my time playing catch up w/h animes backlog.