Failed mirror causes LARGE problems

Well, today I started wrestling with a very odd problem. My main page had failures of the nav bar, which I traced to the block-random.php I was using (by disabling it in my html). At first I thought something on my gentoo box had changed, so I re-compiled apache, php, mod_php and mod_ssl. This didn't fix it. My next idea was that I had broken my gallery dir, so I attempted a few things here. Eventually I downloaded a clean latest cvs .tar.gz file and extracted it. I ran through the setup and the site worked fine!

I then went back, made all my changes to tweak my gallery and it still worked. That is when I went back into configure mode and added my mirror back in. Site broken, badly. It took me one more time of removing the mirror to figure out that was the problem. I found out that the drives had failed in my mirror server and that it was down currently.

I think that perhaps a little more robustness might need to go into the mirror code. I know that it checks a file to make sure the mirror has the same files as the main site, but perhaps keeping track of the last time the mirror was access and at set intervals when a page is loaded a check to see if the mirror site is even accessible could enable/disable the mirror feature. Just wanted to mention this in case someone else has their gallery go totally bonkers and can't figure out why.

The symtoms make it oddly hard to just "realize" what the problem is. The main page will open (albums.php) because it does not try to load pictures from the mirror at all. Any sub-albums will NOT load and usually you will get your background and PERHAPS a few parts of the initial table that contains the gallery links, admin links, etc...