Tuesday, December 14, 2004

More details on Server Outage

First of all this site was transferred to a new server by my host - that went smoothly. What didn't flow smoothly was my ability to type IP addresses into the WWW and MX records in my DNS host DirectNic. 12 hours later when I wondered why it wasn't live I worked it out and changed it.

While I was at a clients we had a massive storm including a lightning strike that fried my router and the NIC on the server here at home. Fortunately the server itself wasn't damaged, though i have a backup server and insurance. (The insurance will also cover the cost of a new router and NIC's). Still that wasted me several hours last night as I tried to cobble together someone else's router only to find that it couldn't handle bridged connections. everntually we had to give up on a bad job and wait til morning.

When I got the new router (Netcomm NB1300+4) it was not immediately apparent just how to configure it. Eventually (3-4 hundred tech support calls later) and 3 hard resets we worked out that only 3 simple adjustments were required to the standard out of the box settings. Worked like a charm. Unfortunately the new NIC's I bought were too good for the Linux server, and its kernel had to be updated and rebuilt. Finally around 2 PM this afternoon we were back online, the mail server almost (literally) fried the CPU on the server until it finished serving SPAM to all our customers and I was able to get back to doing what I was supposed to be doing - working!


Posted by: Jethro | 10:21 PM |