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recent downtime

So, Tim sent me some mail this morning (in the guise of a Nigerian swindler) saying that all the permalinks off of life.neophi.com/ctw were broken, and throwing database connection errors. Likewise, I couldn't get to the MT admin page to see what was going on. Everything else was fine (including DanielR's blog on this very server.

Daniel did some poking around and it seems the problem was twofold:

A: there were some power problems at the hosting location early this morning, and it seems that not everything came back up cleanly, in particular mysql or something related.

B: Even so, I had Rotorblog misconfigured to use dynamically linked category, monthly and individual archive templates. If I'd been using static archive templates, as I should have been, all the pages would have been there for your enjoyment (or at least RASHIDI MANSUELA's enjoyment), with or without the DB being available.

So there you go. The moral? RTFM. And Cascading failures are bad.

And thanks to Tim for the tip, and Daniel for kicking mysql...

Comments (2)

Kate:

Non-computery people (read: me) aren't supposed to understand 95% of this, right?

I don't want to hurt my brain if I don't have to.

Well, no, I guess you don't have to understand the nuts and bolts of it. I mainly wrote about it because a career in computer support casts a long shadow of guilt about self-inflicted downtime.

And "service" is our watchword here; the thought that you, my gentle readers, couldn't get to the site through your choice of RSS tools....well, I just feel awful.

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