lne.com is dead (for now)

We had a bunch of rapid-fire power outages and spikes up at the house yesterday morning which apparently our fancy power-conditioning UPS could not handle well enough. The result: one very dead hard drive in lne.com, our web and email server. Fortunately, I happened to have a bunch of hard drives lying about (small ones, only 40 gig (ha! ha!)) so we (well, OK, Eric) are taking the opportunity to upgrade the machine to a new version of linux.

But there is, alas, a much bigger problem: our backups are inaccessible. We lost a lot of stuff on that machine, years of email, my old web site, all Eric’s really great spam filtering stuff. Bad news. I would like to tell all of you who are reading this who run your own servers to check your backups, make sure they WORK, and come up with contingency plans in case the worst case scenario does come true.