Monday, this week was not a good day because I got an email from my boss that one of our database server was down during the weekend. Our institute have many web applications and dynamic web content information that is stored on this database server. The Dell PowerEdge 2550 Server runs on Windows Server 2000 Professional Service Pack 4 with Microsoft MSSQL 7.0 Database Server. The disk storage was a hot swap SCSI RAID configuration. Eight years ago, I remember the same server was hit by a computer worm virus which badly affected the data. We asked some help from computer repair experts in computer virus eradication and data retrieval.

There’s a Regular Back Up of the entire server; so, there’s little to worry about loosing information. We’re hoping that it would be easy to make the server up again, but after checking the server would not even have a display for POST (Power On Self Test). Having no ready spare server hardware is a trouble. Most of our other servers are IBM series computer. Thus, one thing that added up to our troubles the availability of a hot swap bay that is compatible with Dell PowerEdge 2550.

The solution was to use an ordinary Aspire T300 compatible PC available. I reformatted, installed with Windows Server 2000 Professional, and installed Microsoft MSSQL 7.0 Database. It took us a whole day to find a way of retrieving data from the SCSI Disk. The temporary server was fined tuned to work smoothly with the Cold Fusion Application Web Server. The security settings for the various File Server access was reconfigured also. This took almost half day of working with the new machine.

Trouble shooting and fixing the broken Dell PowerEdge 2550 server would take time. Our in house technicians have tried to find the cause of the problem during the first day by changing video card, changing RAM, but we’re not successful on it. Thus, we’ve called the help of some qualified Dell computer repair service shop. We hope that we could still salvage the broken server and use it again by replacing some parts. This is a very strange thing as there’s no earlier sign of it going to come. Database Servers are important in the day to day operation. Regular maintenance which minimizes downtime would be vital in having a continuously reliable running server.