Microsoft is offering an Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) Beta 2 preview here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie7/default.mspx

I’ve just downloaded it. It has a bit of a Firefox look about it and lots of new stuff. But the PageRank bar doesn’t seem to work, and Bloglines also won’t come up in the browser. Oh dear. I may have to go to the restore point. That would be a pity.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m happy to report our four stricken blogs are now back online.

Google Future
Aristocracy Anecdotes
Vista Office
Digital Camera Latest

The server had a primary hard disk failure. The disk had to be replaced and the whole thing reinstalled. However, the engineers managed to scrape the data off the old disk so everything emerged totally up-to-date. Otherwise, in the worst case, we might have dropped a post or comment or two.

The backup facilities proved robust and everything turned out OK, despite the sites being offline for around 12 hours.

These things happen, of course. A server company can’t be responsible for every tiny connection within every piece of equipment, nor for every bug in largely open-source software. So we have to cut them some slack. Personally, I was impressed by the way they handled this event.

I’m not going to identify the company in case I’ve inadvertently given a bad impression of it in the past few days. Syntagma Media will be staying put, but we will be improving our client-side backup facilities … just in case.

The engineers are keeping us informed on the dramatic primary hard drive failure on our second server. Here are a few comments coming through:

“We are verifying the integrity of the data on the failed disk. If everything checks out, we’ll use the most current data off the failed disk, rather than backups from hours ago.”

“All data in /home has been verified. The 670 GBs of data is now being migrated over to the new hard disk.”

“20% of /home (all user data) has been migrated to the new hard disk. Things are going very well at this point–all things considering. … 50% done at this point.”

Well, looks like miracles can happen. Keep trying the blogs, they should be up soon.

Strange how just a couple of days ago I was going on about how server problems can bring you down, when, hey presto, primary hard drive failure on the server hosting four of Syntagma Media’s blogs.

The sites are still down as I write this: 14.25 GMT, 09.25 EST. However, I’m somewhat relieved by the following screed presented by the server company managing all our sites:

Flashback lets you restore up-to-the-second backups of files, retrieve any past version of any file in the history of your site, restore your entire site, go “back in time” to any point in your site’s history, and much more. Once you’ve used Flashback, you’ll never work without it again!

Phew, saved, it seems !

But does this include a “primary hard drive failure”? The guys at the company are pretty tense right now. The forum has been closed after a few angry entries. So, what are we looking at here?

There seems to be an insidious movement gathering pace to bring down the Web. We know about b5media’s problems, and Paul Short’s disasters are well documented around the blogosphere. Last week we heard that the Million Dollar Homepage Site run by a young chap in England, who sells pixels at a dollar each and has become a dollar millionaire, was brought down by hands unseen. The story is that young Master Tew was being held to ransom by the Russian mafia for $50,000. I’m quoting from BusinessWeek Blogspotting, though I don’t have the reference to hand.

The question arises, how many of our server companies are also being held to ransom, by whom, and are they paying up? What is going on out there?

Does anyone know?