The server was out of action from around 8:30pm on the 27th May to 8:00am on the 28th May, I'm looking into what caused this.

i got a white screen with a message from Nuke (which ive never seen before), something about a server being down and that it would be fixed soon.

i was able to view the AoS front page just fine, but not the Forums or PMs etc.

a while afterwards i just got the "page cannot be displayed" screen, even on the front page.

not sure if that helps...

cheers

~ Tim

The whitescreen was a Nuke message about MySQL not responding. The no response later was me trying to reboot it - the system got stuck while shutting down, had to pull the power this morning. I'm running diagnostics trying to find what caused it, and making sure my backups are in sync. Looks like it might be time for a new server ...

I had the same issues as Malek had. It sounds like the MySQL server took a powder but the Nuke side was still up. Are you using a single machine to run both servers or are they separate machines one for Code and files and the other for the database?

Also, what version of MySQL were you running, maybe it was a problem there. You may want to check the logs from the MySQL server to see what queries were running at the time it failed. maybe a long running query killed it.

All on one server. It's MySQL 5. Checked the logs, can't see anything. And on top of that attempting to restart the machine locked it up completely (which is why it was dead after about 9:30pm as all the processes got shut down), I had to power cycle it this morning, so it's defnitely not a MySQL issue. I'm currently looking at pricing for a new server as the hardware may well be not up to the job any more.

Yeah, I know I have seen a number of hardware issues with our old machines when we were sharing the services like that. It takes a toll on the older hardware.

Out of curiosity, what OS are you running the server on? We had old Windows machines that died after a year, and our Sparks lasted only a couple.. Our Linux boxes seem to be faring better though.

It's Debian, Sarge I think with kernel 2.6 and various patches. It had been up over 13 weeks prior to last night.

I've got machines at work running NT 4 Server that haven't been rebooted in over 5 years

Is the site server a company machine or personal? If it needed to be replaced would it be at your expense? If so, some of us may be able to make small donations to help with the cost.

It's my own PC, currently living under my desk at work. I've been looking at picking up a rack server at some point as I'll likely have to move it out to colocation later this year as we'll be moving some of our servers out too and reducing the line capacity. I've been checking up on prices and even second hand it's looking as though it'll be around £350 for a 1u server (1u means the colo rent will be as low as I can get it, about £35 a month). I've taken to putting a Google ad at the top of the site, and I'm looking at alternatives to getting a cheap system (I've already spoken to someone who might be willing to donate the hardware if I colocate with him, at the same rate I've already been quoted elsewhere, but he's going to have to make some calls first). Ideally I don't want to go tapping users for money, and I'm going to try and get the site hosted in such a way that another site on the same server ends up paying for the rental (which is something else I'm looking into atm )