tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed May 24 07:49:17 1995

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]

Downtime explained, and a plea.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

The sharp-eyed among you have noticed that we were offline for monday
this week, and most of tuesday, too.

The short version: It was down. It's back now.

The long version: The KLI.ORG machine fried it's harddrive on Monday
morning. Best I can tell, the drive was suffering some sort of electronics
failure, and was becoming VERY misbehaved in a VERY big hurry. I did an 
emergency shutdown of the machine shortly after noon on Monday to start
salvage operations.

It originally looked like the machine was going to be down for a while --
I had no extra drives, the KLI doesn't have a huge budget, and I can't
run the machine diskless (Well, I could, but it'd make my pesonal 
machine unusable, which is bad, since that's where my income comes from).
Needless to say, I didn't enjoy this prospect too much.

I ended up gutting one of my other machines (my home machine) of it's
main drive to serve as a temporary replacement. The drive is smaller, but
with a little creative cramming, I got everything to fit, with actually a
bit of space left over.

I present to you an edited version of the letter that Lawrence sent me
to send out to the list manually, when we weren't sure the machine would
be returning so soon. Most of the requests and points are still valid.

			***** CUT HERE *****

My wife thinks I talk around issues too much, trying to ease into the issues
gradually rather than just leaping right in, so for a change let me try the
direct approach and come straight to the point.

We have a hardware problem and we are hoping someone out there can help us.
Simply put, the harddrive which we use to maintain this mailing list as well
as our pages on the World Wide Web, our FTP site,our MUSH, and the mailing
list archive, is dying.  Our system administrator, Jay Grizzard, is doing all
he can to a) back everything up, and b) keep the machine going as long as he
can.

It might be that the mailing list is already down, and you are getting this
letter because Jay has sent out it out by hand from another system.  If this
is the case, time is obviously of critical importance.

[... Some text deleted here ...]

I realize how tacky it is to come on this mailing list with my hand out and
ask for money.  I seem to be spending more time emulating Ferengi values than
Klingon honor of late, but that seems to be one of the hats I get to wear.

BOTTOM LINE, we need a harddrive.  If you have one you'd care to donate, know
someone who wants to donate one, or have the means to get us a substantial
discount on the price of one, please, phone me at 215/836-4955, or send me
email at [email protected] (don't write to the [email protected] address, if the
system is down, I can't get mail there).

This seems like a good place to remind you that because the KLI is a 501(c)3
corporation, any donations you make to us are tax deductible.  

Thank you for your help in this situation,

Lawrence
			***** CUT HERE *****

Now, that being said, I'll update: We have a drive that can keep us going
for a good while. However, I'll eventually want the drive back, so it'd
be nice to get a replacement sometime. (No, I won't take the drive back
until there's a replacement, don't worry).

I won't waste the list's time going into details on what it is we need --
If you think you can help us, contact me or lawrence privately, and we'll
talk with you about the specifics of what we need.

In the good news department, we managed to loose _NO_ data out of the crash.
Not a single bit of data was lost or corrupted (at least, not that I can
tell). Only took me most of an afternoon, too...

Anyhow, that's the scoop. I'm doing the sick thing today, so it's probably
less coherent than I'd like, but it'll probably do.

I've signed this message with the KLI PGP key.. You can get the matching
public key from any keyserver, or by fingering [email protected], and confirm
that this is, indeed, a genuine message, and not someone trying to trick
you into sending them money, etc.

[We're trying to get into the habit of signing anything that's "official"
KLI stuff...]

									-WW

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.7.1

iQCVAwUBL8NHPCMiLUwbMW9pAQGY5QP+JrfYFwHNmf4VMHKSj4NexCB1t07cHsk2
Fcffx9lMjY9wIRkT3gEO1DolQGWZrEEfY3cj+NeV1s85PLpqelxu0/sVEctfCMKA
oY4YSd9ruutXgfW6uC8ZUhHBfVHwIAGVV5Sey8rYC/U+ZMxX0PoYh3CoBnoglTtI
fdleA+D3QUU=
=teo4
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Back to archive top level