The www.TrainWeb.org web server is now up and running after having been down partially on Saturday and Sunday, and completely down on Monday, Tuesday and most of Wednesday (September 22 through 26, 2001).

The www.TrainWeb.org web server experienced a partial hard drive failure on Saturday, September 22, 2001. Only some of the sectors on the disk were corrupted. Some of the websites hosted on this server were working and some were not. If you attempted to visit a web page that was located on a corrupted sector, then the download of that page would either be delayed or would fail to display at all.

We did not realize that there was anything wrong with the www.TrainWeb.org web server until Sunday evening since many sites were working fine including the parts of that server that we use in-house at TrainWeb. On Monday morning, September 24, we figured out that the failure was caused by faulty disk sectors. The next few hours were spent trying to see if we could just recover the disk, but just in case we would not be able to, we simultaneously placed an order for a new hard drive. By the end of Monday, we were able to determine that the old hard drive was too far gone to be recovered.

On Tuesday morning, September 25, the new hard drive was installed in the system. We had some difficulties installing a newer version of the Linux Operating System than we had on the old drive. We were not able to get the new version of Linux to recognize the new hard drive. So, we went back to the earlier version of Linux that we had been using on the old drive.

The installation of the Linux Operating System and restoring all the accounts and files onto the new hard drive took most of Wednesday. Thus, the www.trainweb.org server was not up until late Wednesday afternoon.

We have restored all the data from our backup tapes. The backup tapes were made on Friday evening. If you are the webmaster of any website hosted on this TrainWeb server and you uploaded any new or modified files after Friday evening, then you should re-upload those files.

If you are a webmaster of a website hosted at TrainWeb, you have the primary responsibility to make sure that you have a local backup of all the files that you have uploaded to your web account on the TrainWeb server. TrainWeb does make regular backups of the servers, but you should not expect that all the files that you have uploaded to your website will always be available from our most recent tapes. The most secure backup for your website is to have a backup copy of all your uploaded files stored on your own computer.

Please check back to this page periodically for any further updates. We apologize for the inconvenience.