We lost the friday night webcast because the server in question lost its mind and corrupted the file system on its RAID-1 disk pair; it's done this several times now, but this was the worst. At this point, we're inclined to point the finger at the RAID controller card (a Promise FastTrak SX4000.) We did hardware RAID because that is purported to be faster and possibly more reliable than software RAID, but here's something that I didn't know: disks used in a RAID array are married to the card that wrote them. Even though both disks are supposed to be exact copies of each other, if you plug one of them in and try to use it as a normal non-RAID IDE drive, it doesn't work! The disks are in some proprietary format. So RAID protects you from bad drives, but locks you into the exact model of card that you used to format the drive the first time. Nice, very nice. This is apparently not the case with software RAID under Linux, so we're going to try that next. The sucky part there is that first we have to buy a third drive to make a backup of the two RAID drives before reformatting it.

Also, here is why we only accept credit cards with billing/shipping addresses in the US and Canada:

Subject: INTERNATIONAL ORDER
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 23:48:49 +0800
From: "emma qaz" <emma43love@fastermail.com>
To: <orders@dnalounge.com>

HELLO,
  I AM dan horst FROM USA I WILL LIKE TO PURCHASE SOME ITEMS IN YOUR STORE THEN I WANT THE ITEMS TO BE SHIP DOWN TO MY COMPANY IN NIGERIA,SO I WANT YOU TO MAIL ME BACK IF YU CAN SHIP INTERNATIONAL ORDER,THEN MY METHOD OF PAYMENT WILL BE CREDIT CARD, DO MAIL ME BACK ASAP.
  THANKS
dan horst