Friday 7th September 2007
On 8th September 2007, at 13:14pm PKT, Atif said:
I agree maintaining regular backup is the core task of any system admin. Its good to see quick response from cari.net in case of hardware failure.
On 18th September 2007, at 16:25pm PKT, Karunakar said:
possible change permissions for /var/ folder.
chmod -R 755 /var/
Connection closed by remote host
ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host. This is the message I kept getting when I attempted to login to my web server a few days ago. Maybe you noticed the outage too. At first, a number of thoughts crossed my mind. Maybe the server is under such heavy loads that it's stopped accepting any new network connections. Maybe it's been hacked. Maybe it just wants a cookie. Googling for the error message also brought up similar suggestions.
Not having any other option, I asked for the server to be rebooted. It came back up within minutes, but still remained inaccessible to me and it took another reboot before I could login to see what was wrong. The hard disk had suddenly started showing signs of imminent death and some of the data had already been lost. dmesg showed a number of bus error messages and I knew I had to act fast.
A brief exchange of messages with the Cari.net support guys and soon, the server was up with a new hard disk and the previous one connected as a secondary drive. I copied over all the configuration and whatever data I could and presto. Everything was back to normal. It's a good thing I keep regular backups which allowed me to restore whatever was lost.
So now you know a couple of things. Namely that if you get the above error message, it could mean your system is in grave danger. Cari.net is an excellent host (thanks a lot guys. Hope you don't charge me for the hard drive). And lastly and most importantly, always keep backups.
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20:40pm