On lun., 2021-03-15 at 13:10 +1100, Chris Cason wrote:
> Folks,
> 
> The povray.org server had a catastrophic hardware failure on March 9
> and 
> it was decided that the best course was to replace it completely.
> 
> In doing so I chose to do a full, fresh install of the OS rather
> than 
> attempt to re-install the old one, and only import the data from our 
> backup that we needed to get the various services back up.
> 
> As the failed system was 15 years old and had been through multiple 
> upgrades and patches this meant quite a lot of work to replicate
> configs 
> with the latest software versions and required re-compiling all the 
> custom tools (e.g. the NNTP to Web gateway) we have build over the 
> years. Hence it's taken longer than I would have liked to get it
> working 
> again, but IMO it's worth the effort.
> 
> The NNTP server is the first to be brought back online and at the
> time I 
> post this is the only service running and publicly accessible. Posts 
> made here will eventually migrate to the web view once that's sorted
> and 
> back up; in the meantime only NNTP users will see this message.
> 
> Before anyone asks - yes I did consider pointing the web sites 
> (povray.org, irtc.org etc) to another server and in fact I did for a 
> short time, with a simple placeholder page at the root of each site.
> I 
> quickly noticed from the logs, though, that almost instantly I was 
> getting lots of web crawler traffic (google, bing, etc) and that the 
> server was returning "404 not found" to all accesses excepting the
> root 
> placeholder page that I'd put in.
> 
> That wasn't desirable as it tells the crawlers that the pages that
> they 
> are trying to refresh are no longer there, and they also see the
> simple 
> root page as no longer having any links. I considered changing the 
> config so it returned the placeholder page for all URL's, but that
> had 
> the downside that it would replace any cached content with the 
> placeholder, screwing up future searches.
> 
> I decided that rather than muck around with other solutions (e.g.
> return 
> a temporary failure for all URL's) I'd be better off spending my
> time 
> getting the new server configured, so I pointed the sites back how
> they 
> were. I didn't know at that point that the server was toast and
> thought 
> it might be only a day or two and haven't had time since then to 
> re-visit it.
> 
> Finally, I'd like at this point to give a MASSIVE shout-out to Andrew
> at 
> Netplex Internet in CT, who not only provided us with the
> replacement 
> server (a HP DL360 G5 that they were no longer using) but also stayed
> up 
> until 5am on Saturday getting it set up and configured to the point 
> where I could remotely log in and start the setup.
> 
> -- Chris

Thanks a lot for your dedication. 
Many people are following and encouraging your efforts from the two POV
related Facebook groups:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/739767156410999
https://www.facebook.com/groups/fansofpovray

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