We suffered a short server outage yesterday afternoon, around 16:40 UTC. Turns out that one of the two hard disk’s in the server’s RAID1 array had developed a fault. So we had to take the server off line and replace the disk. The sever was back up and running by 17:10 UTC.
Users may have noticed that the server was a bit slow early evening as the RAID rebuilt itself, copying data to the replacement disk. This process completed circa 21:00 UTC, and everything seems to be running normally again.
I was first alerted to the issue when the server sent me an automated message around 04:00 UTC, alerting me to a failing hard drive. I ran some tests to confirm we had a problem and find our more about what was actually wrong. At around 08:00 I reported the issue to Bytemark, our up-stream provider, the company that actually houses our rack-mount server in York, UK. Once again, Bytemark sorted this issue very promptly and efficiently, literally within hours of us first reporting it. 🙂