On Monday, March 24th, AVSIM will celebrate its 18th birthday. On Tuesday, the 25th, at noon EST, we will shut the system down for planned maintenance (happy birthday to us!!!).
On Tuesday our plan is to power down the system and replace the first of three questionable hard drives in the Web / Forum server. If we power up and the system works, we will allow the RAID system to automatically incorporate the replacement disk as it would normally (or should). On Wednesday, we will repeat the process and as we will also do on Thursday. Each day at noon on those three days, the system will be powered down and a disk will be replaced. If that works, the downtime on each day should be less than an hour. On the final day, Thursday, we will also expand the array to include 2 more new disks to increase our capacity and allow us to go to a RAID configuration that will allow any two disks to fail and we will still maintain operation.
If, on Tuesday, we power on and the system does not come back to life after we replace the first faulty disk, as it did a couple of weeks ago, we will immediately replace all three drives and add the two expansion drives, and then start reloading the system from our most recent (Monday, the 24th's) night back up. Our most recent experience with that back up process showed that the complete restore took some 26 - 28 hours to accomplish. We believe that the length of that restore was due to the faulty remaining disks (no one knows for sure at this point, but that is the best conjecture we have). We are looking for a much faster restore process once have all drives installed and assuming that we have to do a restore at all.
We will keep you posted as we get nearer to the event and during each day.
EDIT: we will be publishing a road map in the coming days as to future improvements, hardware acquisition, remedial activities and the like. Keep your eyes open for that, as I think it will tell you where AVSIM is going in the next five years or so.