[cobalt-users] RAQ550 - General files and GUI corruption

[Pizza Box manager <cobalt-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,
Our RAQ 550 (512 Mo dual 80gb RAID) is going from bad to worse, can anybody 
advise on command line procedures and a proper backup method ?
Problem summary :
All of the sudden 3 days ago the users or email aliases creation or 
modification through the Siteadmin and User Control Panel / GUI stopped 
working.
We (and our clients) could read :
"Unknown Error During Create" or "an error occurred while trying to create 
an email server map file".
Turns out the whole virtusertable and virtusertable.db files were corrupted 
beyond repair;
but until we realized that the mail server delivered messages to the wrong 
pop accounts for hours.
(Eg email sent to blahblah@xxxxxxxxxxx did not have an alias anymore, so it 
ended up in a pop account called blahblah that belonged to a totally 
different client, and other things not logical at all.)
Business reputation damaged as you can imagine.

More fun began when recreating aliases and resaving the catchall address 
and Email server name for the domains ENDED UP DESTROYING THE DNS VALUES 
for these names.
All WWW A records were detroyed (!) - by the time we understood it they had 
begun to propagate.
That directly impacted the emails too, as the Cobalt seems to create 
aliases like name@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx, so email delivery stopped working.
Last night some features in the GUI stopped working altogether - like 
account modification, creation, etc. They actually started timing out,
making us fear we are in a known RAID situation described at 
http://list.cobalt.com/pipermail/cobalt-developers/2003-February/038655.html.
The backup systems liek Arkeai offered in the 550 did not work anymore.

This morning we do not have access to the GUI anymore, for anything.
It gets stuck at http://IP:444/loginHandler.php and then times out.

SSH still works so you'll understand I cry for help - can anybody advise on 
a proper backup method ?
I understand the email files are not like in the RAQ4 in a special dir 
anymore, so backing up the sites would also keep the emails too right ?
Would a manual RSYnc do, does anybody have a loop to backup all sites ?

Thanks for your attention, I'll appreciate help in my desperate situation...
Best regards,