At time of writing, Dan has been able to salvage the vast majority of data from the stricken machine. It looks like everyone's home directories (including mail archives) should be just fine. We're less certain about all the websites and MySQL databases until we've had time to examine them properly.
We're taking advantage of this downtime to do something long overdue, which is move accounts over to the new server in the US, which is a far faster and more reliable serving platform, with 24/7 support, rapid hardware fixes, decent backup space etc. However, getting everyone over may take a little time. Our first priority is mail: both the existing mail archives, and the mail that's been queued up waiting to be delivered while the box is down. So we're going to be spending most of today on that. If you need your mail as a matter of urgency, please leave a note in the comments of this blog entry and we'll prioritise you.
Once your mail is moved over (which it may already have been - check!), your mail server will be marmite.j-colo.net, running both POP and IMAP. (Marmite is, as you may have guessed, the replacement for butter.) Your existing username and password should work fine - let us know if it isn't. If you're using IMAP, please don't go creating any new mail folders until all your mail archive is moved over - we don't want to overwrite any new stuff by accident.
Once again, we apologise wholeheartedly for yet another extended bout of downtime. Be assured that we're all working flat out to fix things, and make them much better for the future.
Posted by Yoz at August 16, 2005 01:00 AMi need my mail extremely urgently!!! some of my inbox seems to be available when i point a POP3 client at it. sadly there are over 1000 old messages there and they're coming in oldest first.
anything you can do would be appreciated. can i get SSH access to marmite in order to run PINE??
Posted by: Matthew Karas at August 16, 2005 08:17 AM