AList disaster recovery

K

Thread Starter

Ken Crater

Hi all,
It's been an interesting week for the Automation List. You may have noticed a lighter mailbox recently -- the server hosting the AList experienced disk problems (a RAID array, which was *supposed* to provide some protection from single-disk failures, but we suspect a problem in the RAID controller <sigh>). This resulted in corruption of the configuration file for the Automation List.

No problem -- we went to our backups and... discovered that the partition containing the mailing list configuration was NOT being backed up.

For the past week, we've been picking through the binary file (actually a Python pickle file) extracting your email addresses, rebuilding the site on a new machine (which IS being backed up) and restoring things as best we can.

Unfortunately, we were not able to restore all the detailed settings for your subscriptions -- for instance, if you prefer another language for admin messages, if you wish to receive only certain topics, etc. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but you'll have to reset these to what you want them to be.

I'll be triggering the password-reminder feature (all the passwords have been reset with the new install) so you'll each get a password reminder
message in email. This message will have a web address you can go to for making changes to your subscription.

Thanks for your forbearance, and we definitely have some new entries in the "lessons learned" books from this experience.

Best Regards,
Ken Crater
[email protected]
 
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