Ben Scott Saved Our Bacon (Was: GNHLUG is back on the Internet)

[Ben Scott]

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 1:37 AM, Bill McGonigle <bill at bfccomputing.com> wrote:
> Ben spent tons of hours working on our server recovery and even took a
> day off of work to get it back in action.

  While I sincerely appreciate the gesture, I think your idea of my
effort paints me in a better light than the reality.  Some mitigating
factors here:

A1. I've had the pair of new 73 GB disks in my possession for nearly a
year.  If I had gotten off my duff
and finished that prep work, we would have been using them well before
now, and never gone down.

A2. One of the old 18 GB disks failed back in August.  So we knew the
system was running on just one good disk.  See A1.

A3. I could have decided to put GNHLUG ahead of recreational
activities from my weekend, and maybe gotten the server up a week
earlier, and before I took that day off.

A4. All told, I didn't spend *that* much time actually working on the
server.  Much of the downtime was a matter of priorities and schedule
alignment, rather than continuous effort.

  I'd also like to take this opportunity to point out that other
people contributed, and *they* are much less recognizied:

B1. Matt Brodeur has an off-site computer which makes automatic
backups of the GNHLUG server.  Thanks to that, I was never worried
that we would suffer serious data loss.  Even if both disks died, we'd
be able to recover to within six hours.

B2. When the server went down, Bill McGonigle promptly stepped forward
with offers of temporary hosting.  He provided the "sad penguin"
notice so people would know what's going on.  He also took over DNS
during the outage.

B3. Cole Tuininga donates DNS services, and worked with Bill and me to
handle the DNS changes during the outage.

B4. Several other people contacted me to see if there was anything
they could do to help.  Schedule alignment worked against us here, but
it could just as easily have been them doing all the hard work.

  My thanks to all who contributed.

-- Ben