Faulty peripheral power supply killed my server a little over a day ago.
120 gigs of MySQL data just wouldn’t come up - backup is far from recent. My fault. Most corrupted tables were of course in Friendica.
After much nail chewing everything now appears operational again with minimum(?) data loss.
In other words: can you all read me? ;-)
Ironically, if I would have had more services running in docker I might not have experienced such a fundamental outage. Since docker services usually tend to spin up their exclusive database engine you kind of “roll the dice” as far as data corruption goes with each docker service individually. Thing is, I don’t really believe in bleeding CPU computation cycles by running redundant database services. And since many of my services are already very long-serving they’ve been set up from source and all funneled towards a single, central and busy database server - thus, if that one experiences sudden outage (for instance power failure) all kinds of corruption and despair can arise. ;-)
Guess I should really look into a small UPS and automated shutdown. On top of better backup management of course! Always the backups.
Why so much? A simple daily timer that runs mysqlcheck + mysqldump + a backup of that would be enough for most people. Using a solid OS (Debian) and a filesystem such as BTRFS, ZFS or XFS will also save you from power loss related corruption. Why do people go SO overkill with everything?
Keep it simple, less services, less processes, less overhead, pick well written software and script the rest. Everything works out way better if you don’t overcomplicate things.
at least weekly mysqlcheck + mysqlddump and some form of periodic off-machine storing of that is something I’ll surely take to heart after this lil’ fiasco ;-) sound advice, thank you!
Personally I’d go for as big a UPS as I could afford, but I serve some public-facing stuff from my homelab and I live in an area with outdated infrastructure and occasional ice storms. I currently have a small UPS and have been too tired/overwhelmed to set up automated shutdown yet. It’s not too hard though, I’ve done it before. And even without that in place, my small UPS has kept things going thru a bunch of <10 minute outages.
And if the power in your area sucks, the power conditioning even a good small UPS provides is invaluable.