It happens, people die, hard drives crash, files get erased.
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\nI really feel guilty for using that analogy. After all a bunch of deleted files can’t possibly compare to the grief of loosing a loved one. <\/p>\n
Recently – within the last 3 days- I somehow managed to recode a mission critical<\/em><\/p>\n I don’t know if I should share with you how my hard drive crashed … or partitions got erased, but I might as well. So you won’t do the same thing.<\/p>\n To start our story we must go back to the root of the problem.<\/p>\n When I was installing linux I thought it would be a good idea to have a \/var folder for my www data, and a \/ partition. I neglected to create a \/usr partition. After a while \/ started getting full.<\/p>\n My \/tmp directory caused mysql to wine about no space. So I moved it to \/var\/tmp<\/p>\n It kinda bothered me that I didn’t have enough space, so I started uninstalling various programs I didn’t need. I only had about 300-500 meg free by the end of it. This kinda bothered me.<\/p>\n So I decided that there was plenty of room on my “backup”<\/strong> drive that I could make a nice hefty 10 gig partition for \/usr and use some of that empty space.<\/p>\n Keep in mind this is my backup<\/strong> drive. It’s a separate drive I back everything up to.<\/p>\n I figured worst case scenario I would have to reinstall \/boot.<\/p>\n I backed up \/etc \/boot and just to be safe a copy of my latest mysql dump that’s ran every day, and then zipped.<\/p>\n I really don’t know why I was worried about those files, but I did. I guess it’s because of all the work I did on the dns recently, and well … \/etc is pretty vital. Mysql is equally vital to me.<\/p>\n I don’t know what i was thinking not backing up \/var\/www\/ It’s one of the most important folders on my computer. I guess I was thinking … I’m not playing with \/var so everything should be ok. <\/p>\n In preparing for my trip to the unknown insanity which my life was about to become I also downloaded the latest kubuntu linux cd. A live cd … I love live cds. A full os on a CD that is really quite functional.<\/p>\n I popped in the live disk to reparation my drive.<\/p>\n All went well \/var was there, the old \/usr was there, and the new \/usr was there as I expected \/boot needed to be reinstalled.<\/p>\n Just to make sure, kubutu gives you the option of booting to the hard disk.<\/p>\n No problems there. The server was there, and intact.<\/p>\n Everything was exactly how it should be minus \/boot.<\/p>\n So I copied over the backup of \/boot and … rebooted.<\/p>\n Nothing … hmmm still couldn’t boot from the drive without the CD.<\/p>\n I didn’t want to have to have a cd in the drive just to boot the hard drive, so I loaded up the live cd.<\/p>\n Looking back … having it installed the way it was dumb.<\/p>\n I first had windows on \/dev\/hda and linux on \/dev\/hdb<\/p>\n The windows drive later became my backup drive … just so you know why I had hdb as my boot drive.<\/p>\n Long story short I some how erased \/var. I guess I saw that free 10 gig on the drive, and said why don’t I use that as \/usr instead.<\/p>\n I guess I clicked the wrong line, and when I caught it \/var was gone gone gone.<\/p>\n What is kept in var …. \/var\/mysql *I care about this* and \/var\/www *I care about this*<\/p>\n At first I panicked. Three years of my life … no you don’t understand three years of my life was gone .gone gone ….<\/p>\n I laughed and laughed and laughed. Just gone like that.<\/p>\n Backup backup backup. I thought to myself. Always backup. But it should be ok … it was ok why did i do this I could have just booted from the CD for the rest of my life. Why did I have to play with the drive like a loose tooth that was waiting to be pulled out. Like a scab that needs to be ripped off. Like a hangnail. WHY. Why did I play with it like pealing paint on a bedroom wall that you know if you pull it you’ll just end up painting the whole room.<\/p>\n ARGH hahahaha<\/p>\n So I called the parties involved. It’s bad enough when you delete your drive, but when you delete your clients \/bosses data … it’s bad really bad.<\/p>\n At first I wanted to tell him to F-off and just dump on him every little thing I ever thought of saying to him, but I didn’t.<\/p>\n In fact he asked me if I was quitting. I said … Actually I was wondering if I still had a job, he asked me if he wanted me to have him get an external usb drive, and I told him no, this is my f-up, I’ll get it.<\/p>\n So it was recoup time. At this point in time I thought I had lost all of \/var<\/strong> Most but 1 key area was hidden and intact.<\/p>\n I got off the phone, and went straight to Sam’s Club. Pretty cheap drives. I grabbed a 250 GB drive, so I wouldn’t have to mess with the other drive I just goofed up, just in case I could find some sort of data recovery tool. It was worth $100 to me to get a drive that I didn’t always have to wonder about maybe I can retrieve the data ….<\/p>\n I also grabbed an external 100 GB usb drive.<\/p>\n At this point in time my head is spinning, and I’m just asking myself what do I need to do first, what first?<\/p>\n What’s the first step?<\/p>\n Set up http, no first step is … first step is. For the record I went the speed limit the whole way \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n I kept thinking to myself … no I’m not going to kill myself over a bunch of pictures, it’s just too stupid…<\/p>\n It’s a good thing that my boss doesn’t care about pictures that were already sent to the client.<\/p>\n There were quite a few “Oh thank God” moments, and “thank you Jesus” while I was plugging away that night.<\/p>\n I thought I lost my database … I didn’t I forgot I even backed it up … Thank God I had the presence of mind to back that up.<\/p>\n So the night kept getting better.<\/p>\n Damage control was … I just lost \/var, and not *all the pictures* just the ones that were of my children … that were backed up on my wife’s computer … I hope.<\/p>\n I still had my precious phpMUR, and xphMUR because I kept them in \/home\/erm\/ \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n My friends website was unharmed as well, just one small area was affected … which I don’t think he cared about, but I’m not sure.<\/p>\n On the first day I set up the following servers: Most of those were pretty easy since I had the backup of \/etc. If your BIND9 dns is complaining about permissions, just type killall bind9, and restart. It wasn’t letting me kill it using \/etc\/init.d\/bind9 restart.<\/p>\n My second third and fourth days were spent re-developing a mission critical site … well what I get paid for anyways.<\/p>\n It’s weird deciding … should I use the same open template I did before when I make this, or try something new. I’m boring I used the old template.<\/p>\n Granted the css isn’t quite the way I like it on the new site, because I just haven’t had the time to tweak it, but overall I have a site that is 110% better than the old one in some areas, and 85% in others.<\/p>\n Overall I’d say that the site is 90% functional in comparison to the old site.<\/p>\n It’s weird when you recode something, and you think to yourself … why didn’t I do it this way last time, this is SOO much easier. I’m glad I had my db, and html classes. Those 2 saved so much time.<\/p>\n In other areas, like my calendar class which I lost I was thinking to myself … now how did I do that?<\/p>\n I don’t know if this was a testament to my coding\/server_admin skills, or a testament to how dumb 1 person can be, but now that I’m almost done with the mission critical site … I can see a light at the end of the tunnel, and realize I must be pretty good at it.<\/p>\n Erm<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It happens, people die, hard drives crash, files get erased.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,24,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-insanity","category-life-stories","category-things-that-get-me-mad"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.the-erm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.the-erm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.the-erm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.the-erm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.the-erm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.the-erm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.the-erm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.the-erm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.the-erm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nWell obviously it was put in the drive, but that wasn’t what I was thinking about.<\/p>\n
\nDNS, HTTP, SSH, SMTP, POP3, and MYSQL<\/p>\n