Welcome back to Talk About IT! We had a bit of a mishap, so all the previous content is gone. Backup, backup backup!

Luckily, all the customer data has been recovered, with no loss. The server has been reconfigured, with a proper RAID setup, and off-site backups. It is going to make things a lot easier to recover, hopefully! Once the extra computers I’ve ordered have arrived, I’ll work on setting up haproxy and getting some clustering going. That should help alot!

What happened? Well, the bad choice I made of running my server as a portable installation finally caught up to me. I was running my Linux installation off of a 32GB USB3 flash drive (including this site!) for the past 5 years, with the idea of putting it into a NEWER server and imaging the flash drive to the first part of the hard drives. This never came to fruition, and I paid for it. The flash drive died a horrible death.

I got some help from members of the Super User community that I’m part of, and we got the backup drive running, and the new data copied over so I could fix the server. I learned alot along the way, such as what FUSE actually is, and that my backup script ran the day before and copied itself into my data drive every night. Great! But I missed the crucial part of my /var folder - where the MySQL databases lived! So, this blog is getting started over.

During my struggle, I learned that the default Debian install image does not support mounting an NTFS-formatted drive. Excellent… But I could use System Rescue CD to mount it, and move my data over. That took a while, but during the rsync, I found out my server was backing up the flash drive (mostly) to the hard drives - the /etc, /usr, and the /var/www folders were all safe. Notice the other issue there? No /var/log - not making that mistake again!

I have the server up and running, and decided I’m going to document my journeys of getting my old services back up and running - if not for me, for someone else maybe down the line. I’m going to start doing tutorials of services I’m setting up, and I hope to be yet another resource on the great wild Internet of Manuals - No YouTube tutorials though.

So, once I’m happy with how WordPress is setup, I’ll document my commands and functions, then move on to the next step - Setting up BIND9, and ISC DHCP Server from the Debian Repos.

Thanks for sticking with me!