Google Way Back 1998
Warning: Before reading this post, make sure that you don’t know everything about the so-called way back machine, also known as the internet archive. This post is for the people who had no idea about the internet’s time machine.
I just discovered this awesome website through Marhgil. I told him that our PRC board exam results website was down, and all the files and database was wiped out by our VPS host because their hard disk was corrupted. I don’t know what to do, my latest file and database backup of the said website was last December 2007, and it’s way too not-updated. Marhgil then told me to check archive.org, this is the largest repository of websites, archived, and arranged chronologically from the date after the website was born and get 6 months old.
I then checked prcboardexamresults.com to see if it was archived. Sadly, it wasn’t because that site is only 5 months old, It lacks only a month in able to be archived. To verify, I also checked the Asian Business Directory website to see if they really require sites to be 6 months old before it will be saved in the database. The said website doesn’t exist in the database even if it’s more than 6 months old. Weird eh? I just assumed that their system was not 100% accurate, and if it’s 100% perfect, it’s a myth. I was curious about this time machine, that’s why I tried to check other websites, and came up checking Google.com. Without further a do, let me introduce Google way back November 11, 1998!
Isn’t it amazing? It’s like the prophecy of a time machine fulfilled! But only in virtual mode. Hehehe. If you’ll browse the website, you will find out that Sergey Brin and Larry Page are not only the first developers of Google, but also Craig Silverstein (The guy that I haven’t heard without this time machine). Google was also copyrighted to Stanford University during its early days (I bet Stanford is really really really proud of Google. That’s for sure!).
So if you have a long lost website that you are trying to find, the way back machine is the answer. Check it out here: www.waybackmachine.org or you can also visit www.archive.org. I also visited Yahoo!’s website, and it’s way to cute 🙂 Hehehe. It’s really really true that everything starts from small beginnings.
oh….. macheck nga 🙂
Waaaa. Goodbye PRC BOard Exam Results! 😀
Cool! let me check my old site.. hmmm.. this seems to be very clever! 😀
Sorry to hear about the plight of your VPS account. HostIcan has a RAID 1 configuration on every server and performs nightly backups. They should have restored it. how come?
Welcome back.
Wordpress rocks. 🙂
@mikko – oo nga 🙁 too bad huhuhuhuhu…
@charles – oo nga eh.. eto reply nila:
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I appreciate your patience during this trying period.
Here’s what happened to your VPS node over this weekend, and forgive me if some of the details are a little technical. I want to be as thorough as possible, so you’ll have a full understanding of what went wrong and what we did to fix the problem.
It all started on Friday. An engineer observed that the hard drive on your node was causing issues within the drive cluster, and he scheduled a RAID repair – which normally doesn’t take all that long; about 2-4 hours at the most.
Upon completion of the four-hour service timeframe, we noticed that the RAID stopped repair operations at approximately 29%, so we dispatched an engineer to review the hard drives, which seemed to be functioning normally.
Shortly after this, the file system check kicked into “effects,” which caused some sites to experience an internal server error, as the file system went into a “Read Only” format, which is normally done when all the files are being checked by the Linux kernel.
After this process went on for about six hours, we realized that it was not going to finish, so we re-examined all the hard drives via our RAID 10 array on the affected server, and found that one of the subunits reported that there was a I/O (input / output error) on one of the drives, which normally means that the hard drive is ready to fail or isn’t fully operational because sectors have gone bad.
Again, another engineer was dispatched to review the drive, and was told to replace the mechanism that caused the issue. Once he had done that, the rebuild restarted, which froze the whole subunit one, after which the server became virtually unusable. We had rebooted the server to get to the BIOS level to resolve it and rebuild the RAID array outside of the Kernel.
Upon reboot, and logging into the BIOS, we found that the secondary drive in unit 1 had also failed, which caused segmentation of data, and combined with the rebuilding process, started to issue problems with I/O on the drives.
The drives where stopped and we booted into a Live CD file system, which could mount all the partitions, and started the salvage process. We confronted more input / output errors and the data was being copied.
At the moment, we have more than 50% of all the VPS accounts restored in our backup, but we are reviewing the data on the backup, as it is possible some of the data has gotten corrupted.
Unfortunately, hard drive failures do happen. We use server-grade hardware, which costs a lot more than the drives you buy for your PC. They carry warranties of up to five years and extreme mean time before failure ratings. But drives still fail. They are mechanical devices and, when used on a 24×7 basis day after day, they can develop problems unexpectedly. This is the way things are, and we have no control over such eventualities.
While we do perform regular backups, we have always urged our customers to perform backups too, on your own computers, and even store a separate copy of your most valuable data in an offsite location. Unlike most hosts, we use RAID 10 instead of RAID 1, which ensures double-redundancy. But drives can and do fail regardless of the precautions we take.
We want to assure each and every one of you who were affected by this outage that we are doing everything we can to restore your files and get your sites up and running as quickly as possible. You will be contacted privately about account credits and other issues that you’re concerned about.
Please let us know if you wish to continue with the HostICan VPS service, we will be more then happy to re-create your VPS environment, and provide you with full access again.
As Shazam said, our support department was understaffed this weekend because of unexpected illnesses. And we had to redeploy some of our support staff to work with us on pressing technical issues.
I realize this may not be the answer you want to hear, but all we can tell you is what happened and what we are doing to address the problem.
Sincerely,
Randy Slone
HostICan Representative
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Kaya new lesson learned nanaman. Expect the unexpected, dapat nag backup ako kahit once a day, bago matulog backup.. hehehe.. buong cpanel config e babackup ko.. sa server ko ngayon,.. bawat full backup 6GIG, ang laki waaaaaaaa!
4x na ako nag backup, so 24gig na agad yun. dapat bibili ako ng external hard disk para maka backup ng atleast 1TB.. hehehe.. whew!
musta po ung traffic since transferring from blogspot?
curious lng 😉
Lets face it, there is no perfect system but at least google is doing their own way to contribute in this digital society.
from the Network Administrators point of view, back up is important. check my site for more details. Thanks! keep it up!
@julia – bumaba.. dati 4,000+ ngayon 1,000+ a day nalang.. may araw din na di umaabot ng 1000… I think dahil sa DNS ng iba.. yung iba 404 error parin pag nag vivisit sa blog ko.. sa iba lang ok.. 🙁
@pedroiho.. yep… nothing is perfect.. and there is no nothing that exists.. hehehe 😀
Try a western digital product. They have this external storage device and I am using it to backup our corporate data. It automatically and instantaneously back up data every time you save it.
Here’s the link.
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=342&language=en
Neat!
ganun?
oo nga pla ung
https://www.jehzlau-concepts.com/2008/02/an-experiment-in-increasing-rss-subscribers.htm
404 pa rin.
di ko pa tapos basahin yun eh.
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