[News] Astro-Wise database up again

[D.R. Boxhoorn]

Dear Astro-Wiser,

We are happy to announce that the OmegaCEN database cluster is up and
running again. Unfortunately, any changes made after

   Monday, June 14th, 2010 07:00

have been lost.
The exact cause still has to be confirmed, but it is likely that some
rare hardware event on Sunday caused the data on the underlying disks
to become corrupt. This happened in such a way that the corruption
was unnoticed by both the RAID controller and the database. The first
attempt to read the corrupted block resulted in a database error. The
nature of the error was such that the usual recovery procedures failed
and the database had to be completely restored and recovered. Due to the
size of the database and the available network bandwidth the recovery
process took longer than hoped for.
We will investigate if the downtime can be decreased in case a problem
of similar magnitude occurs in the future.

You are welcome to report any anomalies that you experience when using
the OmegaCEN database.


Thank you for your patience,

                                                    Danny, Gesina & Kor