Follow the Newted Community on Twitter
Well, I’ve finally done it. After several fruitless attempts to resurrect the Newted Community server, I disassembled the Cobalt Qube and extracted the bothersome hard drive. The drive will soon be winging its way to the good folks at Datacent for appraisal and ultimate recovery. Hopefully.
The site backups and existing bits of data from the server were not as complete as I had originally thought. Yes, I do have a few significant chunks of the site available for republishing, but there are several gigabytes of personal directories and other information that remain buried on the hard drive. This is why I have decided to go ahead with the process of data recovery.
I would also like to apologize for the radio silence. To be honest, I didn’t really have any news to share. However, now that some action is being taken, status updates should start appearing on a more regular basis.
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