Adventures in Shooting Trouble
So, as soon as I leave town for a couple of days, my website goes off the air.
Nothing, not even a 404 when I try to hit it. Just a timeout. Since the pictures and most of the other media I link to in my posts here are all there, it took those with it.
When I try to ssh into it, ssh times out.
I call the young fellow who takes care of my vicious watch dog while I’m gone and he agrees to be my eyes and fingers when next he goes to toss said watch dog a couple of traveling salesmen for dinner.
When he gets there, he calls me. I have him log into to the server; it’s responsive.
I have him stop the website. It stops in the normal amount of time (when the database is complaining–which was my biggest worry and could have led to hours of command-line SQL agony–it can take up to half an hour to stop). (As a safety measure, I run a script to back the database up to an *.sql file every morning at four.)
Probably not the server.
I sent him to the equipment locker to power down the router; shut down the modem, count to 10, and restart it and let it come back to life; then restart the router; then return to the server and restart the website.
Back.
All it needed was a good swift kick in the diodes.
Before I let him off the phone, I hit the website and ssh’d into the box just to make sure it was okay.
The young fellow doesn’t have a clue about Linux, but he follows directions real good.