Normally, I’m a big fan of coincidence and synchronicity. Today, not so much. On the eve of the tenth anniversary of Apple discontinuing development of the Newton, the Cobalt Qube which had been hosting the Newted Community site for the past nine years suffered a catastrophic hard drive failure. Ouch. If that’s not a coincidence, I’m not sure I could put my finger on a better example. And while I’ve been attempting to resurrect some portion of the site data from a questionably coherent backup, I’ve already had a half dozen offers of replacement hardware. Now that’s a community indeed. By the way, if you’re a Newton geek of any measure, you will have understood the nod to our little green friend in the title of this post. For everyone else, “deep toast” refers to a alert message indicating that some piece of Newton hardware (generally the rechargeable battery) can no longer be reliably used. An arguably fitting salute.
Between the recent weather-related power outages, an underpowered (not necessarily uninterruptible) power supply, and an increasingly cranky server, e-mail and web services for the Newted Community have been less than reliable this week. To all those community members that rely on Newted for their mail, I apologize for the unexpected downtime. I really wish it were possible to see these things coming, but they tend to sneak up behind you when you’re not looking and smack you upside the head. That being said, I am trying to address the server stability by clearing out a pile of older files to give the memory swap a bit more legroom (or is that headroom?). However, the reality of the situation is that this 9 year old Cobalt Qube may be ready for retirement. That being said, migrating existing users over to a newer server platform from the Qube will be neither simple nor quick (perhaps not even possible, except by manually adding hundreds of individual accounts). The good news is that everything appears to be running normally this morning.
Subscribe to posts (RSS)
Subscribe to available domain name of the week (RSS)
Subscribe to available domain name of the week (Atom)
ISSN 1496-3221
Copyright © 1996-2012 Grant Hutchinson