We want to apologize for the lengthy outage of the Stovebolt site. It couldn't possibly have come at a worse time. I was on vacation in North Carolina (and on a very slow dialup connection besides) when the primary boot drive on the server failed catastrophically. It wasn't possible to save the data or the OS.
Our gracious sponsor, American Classic, paid all the expenses to have the professionals at CI host (our ISP) remove the drives, install new ones, configure the RAID setup so this will never happen again, and install FreeBSD 5.4. Please show American Classic your appreciation by shopping with them when you can. Without them, it would have been several more days before we could have restored the server.
Unfortunately, when their work was completed we were still left with the need to install all the necessary applications, restore the data and reconfigure the server. This is quite a time consuming process, which I began remotely while still in NC and am still working on as we speak. Email capability was restored first, and then I began working on the web server.
We still have a way to go, but the basic functionality
should be available to you. (Please let me know right away if something you want to do isn't working. My email address is
geek@stovebolt.com.)
Hopefully we won't have this problem again any time soon. We will look into ways to ameliorate this sort of problem in the future, but it's difficult when you can't have backup servers that can be brought online in an emergency.
