It was almost ironical that less than 24 hours after I posted my previous post (which, now, no longer exists for reasons that I will explain below) celebrating 30-days of uptime with 96MB.com (or the 96MB RAM VPS box it is sitting on), 96MB.com received such a huge visiting volume that the box could no longer hold it through and surrendered with a DB Connection Error screen.

Out of panic, I tried to reboot the box, the shutdown was fine, however after I tried to boot it up again, here is the error message that I have got:

Filesystem unmounted: sudo /bin/umount /home/xen/vps2433.vm/mnt VPS config file written: /home/xen/vps2433.vm/vps2433.vm.cfg Filesystem Created: sudo /sbin/mkswap /dev/VolGroup00/vps2433.vm_vmswap Filesystem labelled: sudo /sbin/e2label /dev/VolGroup00/vps2433.vm_rootimg domU_disk_root Filesystem mounted: sudo /bin/mount /dev/VolGroup00/vps2433.vm_rootimg /home/xen/vps2433.vm/mnt VPS hostname file written: /usr/local/openitc/tmp/vps2433.vm_etc_hostname Files chowned: sudo /bin/chown root:root /usr/local/openitc/tmp/vps2433.vm_etc_* File moved: sudo /bin/mv /usr/local/openitc/tmp/vps2433.vm_etc_hostname /home/xen/vps2433.vm/mnt/etc/hostname VPS hosts file written: /usr/local/openitc/tmp/vps2433.vm_etc_hosts Files chowned: sudo /bin/chown root:root /usr/local/openitc/tmp/vps2433.vm_etc_* File moved: sudo /bin/mv /usr/local/openitc/tmp/vps2433.vm_etc_hosts /home/xen/vps2433.vm/mnt/etc/hosts Error: Domain vps2433.vm does not exist. Error: Domain vps2433.vm does not exist. IO Error: /usr/local/openitc/tmp/vps2433.vm_etc_resolv.conf 

And any effort to Get Status on the VPS box returned the following:

Error: Domain vps2433.vm does not exist. 

I have moved the website to my main web server for now so that at least my dear readers won’t be seeing something like this while loading:

However, as a result of backups happening only once a day, my very last post celebrating the 30-day anniversary of 96MB.com, is no longer viewable at this point.

I will remain cautiously optimistic at this point (have contact OpenITC but has yet to see any reply) to bring the entire VPS back without too much trouble, however if everything fails, I will just have to rebuild things from scratch.

Lessons learnt:

1. Backup, backup, backup: Fortunately I have cron jobs to perform backups daily, and although I have lost some of the data, majority are safe.

2. Some times, you may get more than what you wish for, and they are not necessarily all good 🙂

3. This has actually re-affirmed my decision to continue on with this blog, however more caution will be taken to ensure the VPS will be able to stand more impact during the attacks.

Thanks all my readers who have supported me to continue writing by constantly visiting and re-visiting my blog, and for those who have the intention to bring the site down, I am sorry, 96MB will always be here!