It all started Monday early afternoon when I could not reach this very post.thing.net web site. I noticed that the other thing.net sites were down too and checked with Walter in Berlin, who proceeded to restart the Apache web server, only to see an extremely high load on it. Not knowing what's going on we checked with Jan who immediately diagnosed a disk failure. Bad news. We had upgraded to a new server just about a year ago, a new machine with two big drives and a RAID setup (redundant array of independent disks, originally redundant array of inexpensive disks). As it turned out, apparently both drives had suddenly problems and the RAID system, which should make recovery from such failures tolerable, failed. So now everything had to be copied manually to drive partitions that were still ok. Turned out that a lot of junk had accumulated over the months, some email folders had about 5G of data in them. Who in hell needs 5G of email crap? Well, nobody gives a hoot, it's just the new normal. I just wondered about all the new huge data centers that are being build, gobbling up resources like water and electricity, for what? For gigatons of silly videos, pictures and annoying, stupid, useless spam. So anyway, we had to move mountains of trash, copying for days, since the sick drive was really going slow. As I write this we are still moving data... but at least the web sites are up and https://webmail.thing.net is working for now.

More info and perhaps some reflections later. Thanks to Eva and Franco for the picture. It really cheered me up after a distressing 48 hours...