Not to belabor the obvious, but after a couple days offline, my blog, e-mail server, message boards, various Web sites, and other server-based applications are back up and running. Given the severity of the problem that caused me to vanish from the Net in the first place, the recovery should have taken a week or so. That it only took from Wednesday night until Friday night is testament to the dedication of one man who didn’t have to put in the kind of effort he did.

Here’s the story.

Checking e-mail one last time before hitting the sack on Wednesday night, I realized the server was down. I called Jim Joss, who hosts my server at his business. I expected to leave a message, but it turned out he was on his way in anyway. He called when he got there and told me it didn’t look good; efforts to reboot weren’t working. The server uses a Linux OS and features a two-hard drive RAID array. In a RAID setup, a controller card connected to both drives ensures the contents of one is mirrored to the other on a regular basis. If one drive fails, the other kicks in. Defying the odds, both my drives failed simultaneously. Jim was able to get one of the drives back up for a minute or two at a time; then it would die again.

I picked the box up in the morning, bought two new drives and a controller card, and took it all to Mike Vincenty. Mike is a very good friend, fellow lover of good music, co-author of a handbook we wrote for Ragan Communications, and an IT geek of the first order. It took Mike all of about 20 minutes to bring one of the hard drives to life long enough to retrieve all my data; the retrieval process took about three hours, with me pointing out the directories that needed to be salvaged.

Then Mike really went to work. He rebuilt the box with the new hardware, installed the latest versions of Linux and my e-mail server software, and configured everything as much as he could before the box went back online. He hammered at it until about 2:30 a.m., when I suspect he collapsed face-down on his keyboard. He was back at it Friday morning. About 2 p.m. on Friday, we met at the server farm where it took him about an hour to configure the box so the Internet would find it. He got my e-mail up and running. Then he went back to his office and spent the next six hours getting the Web services up and running and reinstalling my files. Some of the configuration—like a module that needs to be added to PHP in order for this blog to function—are particularly gnarly.

When we were identifying data to save, I caught a glimpse of Mike’s whiteboard listing the work he had piled up for his clients. Having been involved with a few server builds before, I know this usually takes a good week. But Mike dropped everything and dedicated pretty much every waking minute to helping me out. In addition to expressing my gratitude, I wanted to let you all know: Should you need someone to do any network work, server configuration, or back-end IT services, Mike’s your guy. There are none better out there.