Hi,

You may be looking at this because you have a web site or mailing list hosted by lug.org.uk and you are wondering where it went.

At just after 01:00 GMT today, Sunday 25th June, the server suffered some form of hardware hiccup. The following was seen on its console:

hda: lost interrupt
hda: dma_timer_expiry: dma status == 0x61
hda: DMA timeout error

and it locked up.

Over the last few weeks we have had similar problems a few times, but they all involved /dev/hdc and the server always came back after a power cycle via Black Cat‘s APC masterswitch. Last Wednesday I went to the data centre and replaced hdc for a new Western Digital drive in an attempt to cure the problem.

This time involves /dev/hda and the machine isn’t coming back after a power cycle. I expect the worst to be honest, but if we are lucky it’s simply the case that hda is dead and the BIOS is refusing to boot from hdc.

All this means that I need to go to the data centre later today, as soon as I am able, and assess the situation. We could be in for a long, possibly permanent downtime.

I know this sucks, but before complaining too much, please consider that we have no budget and our existing setup consists of desktop-quality hardware being used in a 24×7 hosting environment. If anyone is prepared to donate a decent 1U server that can take two IDE (PATA) drives and 3x1GB DDR RAM (from the existing hardware) then that would be really great.

I will update as soon as I know more.

Cheers,
Andy