Emergency Maintenance

[Alan]

I received the following message from our hosting provider today:


Hello, our sensors have detected a potentially critical issue in yourserver’s motherboard.
Unfortunately, Replacement is the only fix.
We’ve scheduled the repair for tonight 1AM to 2AM 1/23/2016 CST.
Your Data is 100% safe and on return to service all sites will return asthey were at shutdown.
We regret the interruption and will take all steps to complete in a timelymanner.
Hopefully, we'll be back up early tomorrow morning without incident.

[rosarugosa]

Thanks for the heads up Alan. Fortunately, I myself am always shut down for routine maintenance during that time frame :)

[cdttmm]

Thanks, Alan, for continuing to be the point person on all the behind-the-scenes tech stuff. I saw the notice when I logged in this morning, but that was long after the maintenance was completed so it seems like we are good to go!

[ToomuchStuff]

Must have been fixed. Wondering what the critical fault would have been, that required a full motherboard replacement.

[SteveinMN]

Must have been fixed. Wondering what the critical fault would have been, that required a full motherboard replacement.
Probably a failed ROM or controller. Depending on who the Internet host is for SLF, the computers may be little more than a single circuit board that addresses a certain amount of RAM and communicates with a disk array. At the price of downtime and technical help, it's easier to pull the board, replace it with a known-good one, bring the hosting back up, and then determine if the old one can be fixed economically. It also may have been an opportunity to bring that hardware more in line with other servers in the rack.

I'm glad it worked out well and quickly.