What a nightmare!
If you've visited here in the last few weeks, you wouldn't have seen much. My Linux server hard drive died! Since I'm a moron who did not take backups, this was a major problem. I had done weeks of work configuring RHEL3 to do everything I wanted, including a web server & tomcat (connected), MySQL, the Jakarta Jetspeed portal, Roller weblogger, Samba, cups printing, UPS monitoring for automatic shutdown during a power outage, etc. Plus I had all of my digital photos, nearly a year of weblog entries, Quicken backup files, and more.
Luckily, I was able to afford an expensive lesson. DriveSavers can resurrect content on a dead drive!
You're reading this in my restored Linux system. While I was waiting for the economy service at DriveSavers to recover my data, I bought and installed a new hard drive. I also decided to take this opportunity to upgrade to RHEL4. I think RHEL3 had another year or two before the support window ended, but I bought at least another year before I have to reconfigure everything again by going to RHEL4 now.
So after I got RHEL4 up and received my data back from DriveSavers, I had to put everything back together. This was complicated by MySQL version changes, having to locate the incredibly hard to find instructions for building mod_jk2.so since the RHEL3 version was severly flaky, etc. But at the end of the day, the site is back! I still have to get wikid back up, but hopefully that won't be too hard either.
Moral of the story; do backups, and maybe even use RAID to protect against a drive loss (that's my next project). Second moral; if you don't follow the first, call DriveSavers!