by desperationfan » 28 Feb 2013, 18:27
Dave,
Thanks for keeping on top of this disruption to the normal operations. I am sure it has cost you time and money from lost sales. The good news is that your content and ideas some of the best in the industry and you do have a following in the desperation/pee fetish and I assume bondage community so your customers will be back.
Taking Files Forever offline sounds like the correct thing to do for DreamHost as it does sound like they had a major fault with their hardware. I am guessing it was a RAID controller or SAN/NAS that went bad or other critical part of their infrastructure that has been the root of these problems as normally when things start to act flakey, I look to the hardware as a cause. The thing that is frustrating in trying to troubleshoot these sorts of problems is that when things are flakey and things are not failing all the time, it is hard to tell where the problem is. In many ways it is good that even small files started to have a problem with their EOF (End Of File) tags so that the exact cause of the problem could be identified and replaced.
The one thing that confuses me is that I would think there was a backup of their database that lists all of the customers along with what files they are authorized to have access to so it should be a simple matter of restoring that database to it's previous state. What it sounds like is that it will be a manual process to get things going again. I am hoping that it is DreamHost and not you that will have to do the manual work as it is really not your fault that they did not have a better backup system in place. Keep up the good work and I am glad to see that fixes are on the way.
Thanks,
Desperation Fan