Miraheze disk issues
Yet another faulty SSD issues
That time, I want to post something on the Internet. Considering the very nature of the content that I’m trying to post, I’m considering to put it on wiki. But, I’d rather to post it on a private wiki instead, so I don’t have to keep alert against vandals 24/7. It’s mentally exhausting after all..
Then I realized that I still have a private instance of MediaWiki server, somewhere on Miraheze. Good, let’s check it out.
Well. Nope.
Here’s the recap, summarizing all the latest available information from their official Twitter account :
16 November : The cloud server (cloud14) which hosts one of our database, db141, experienced a disk issue. As a result, a number of wikis hosted on db141 are unavailable. About 500 open public wikis are affected by this. We are working with the provider to see what can be done.
18 November : Wikis on db141 will now be showing a message reading "Wiki Temporarily Unavailable"
21 November : We are in the process of sending the disks containing db141 to professional data recovery. It may be possible that the disks are not actually faulty, but rather that the RAID controller is, which would mean the data is safe. Or, it's possible that the actual disks have gone bad. If it is the latter, that would indicate we received a bad batch of SSDs from the manufacturer.
In short : the SSD that stores the database is kind of broken. They’re trying to revive it by using the help of professional data recovery service, but the actual success rate might not be 100% guaranteed, and there’s quite a possibility that the data will be gone forever.
Data center disk failure is quite a disaster. Here’s another case, when HackerNews site was down due to disk failure. And here’s an academic paper, discussing this recurring phenomenon in depth.
That’s why, having a severe trust issue against your server is considered a best practice at these day.
