"Detecting Imminent Failure". Just thinking of that phrase makes me think of a cheesy, apocalyptic sci-fi movie, with some computerized voice explaining that the planet's about to blow up. Or maybe some sort of political statement or something.

Nope. What is it then? What made me think of that weird-sounding phrase? This:

This thing right here had been giving me trouble off-and-on for about a week, I'd say. So the other day I noticed the site working a little freakishly, and so I rebooted it. Got two long error code beeps when I did. So I plugged it into a monitor, and this is what I saw. If you can't read it, you can click on it to open up the full image in a new window and see it in all its ugliness - sorry for the low quality, all I had was my camera phone.

I just wanted to throw this up here so that people can see there actually is a real reason why I kept having to take the site offline. I'm not lazy about updates, I don't just ignore it when the server's down - I'm just a working man with a server with a failed hard drive.

On a related note, the server has been doing quite well keeping up lately. I've tweaked some connection settings a bit because it was basically trying to allow too many connections at once and letting itself get bogged down. I also put more RAM in it, and changed my MySQL settings to take advantage.

The server was down for part of the day yesterday, as some of you may have noticed. It didn't actually lock up or anything, but when I got on, things just didn't look right. I've been having trouble with it lately so I brought it out, hooked it up to a monitor, and saw a nasty little surprise. I'll write more later, but the long-story-short is basically that the hard drive started to fail, which is certainly something that can cause problems. I rebooted the server and got a nice, ugly screen telling me that drive failure was imminent. Not good - but fortunately the drive still did work so I was able to boot up and copy things over to a different drive.