A little bit of geek humor to make your day complete:

“May the 4th be with you.”

Go on. You know you want to use this yourself at some point today, don’t you? Don’t you?

After an hour or so of gaming followed by most of an hour on the phone with a particular someone special, I decided to indulge in a pasttime I’ve all but given up in the last few years. Yes, I put on my headphones and listened to music for a while. Hey, the computer was on anyway, trying valiantly to download some anime for my later enjoyment.

(Keep in mind, now, that a week ago we upgraded the memory in this webserver, and that it hadn’t had a crash for roughly a week before that, even, thanks in part to some configuration tweaks I made a week or so prior to the scheduled upgrade.)

Imagine my chagrin when I decided to check my email one last time before bed (what? oh, like you don’t. go on, pull the other one.) only to stare in horror at the hourglass cursor as Thunderbird utterly failed to connect to my server. I switched to the console screen and tried a ping. No dice. I could ping, and visit, any number of other addresses… just not mine. I took the next logical step, of course. I called Infinity Internet‘s tech support number and left a detailed message. Once I completed the call, on a whim born out of what could be called a stubborn refusal to accept facts, I tried the ping again.

You can probably guess what happened.

Once I finished rolling my eyes in disgust, I placed another call to Infinity’s support line to let them know not to bother rebooting my server…

As near as I can tell, something external to the server went dead for a little while. The evidence is this line in the /var/log/messages file:

e100: eth0: e100_watchdog: link up, 10Mbps, half-duplex

The gist is, that notation tells me that the network cable was unplugged or inactive in some fashion, then came back online, which spawned that “watchdog” message. (Now if only there were watchdog messages about the link being down, I could get a handle on how long we were offline. Argh.) And since that’s the only indication that anything at all went wrong, I’m going with the “someone tripped over a Cat5 cable” theory, until a better theory comes along.

All’s well that ends well, though.

An update on my massive webserver-status post below: The daily random email alias generator is running again, for those of us who made use of it. (Oddly enough, that generator is the last remnant of code from Monaural Jerk to be used anywhere on our server.) Also, I found the problem with emailed comments showing up with empty “From” addresses. Turns out that it’s a problem related to the installation of Spam Karma 2, and I’ve tweaked the code in that plugin accordingly. (It tries, apparently, to make the “From” address something like “wordpress at domain” but it wasn’t working. I simply changed the parts of the code that created the “Reply-To” header and turned them into “From”.) Now any email spam filters (such as SpamAssassin) won’t be scoring “down” comment notifications because of a missing rather-important email header.

Not bad for an hour’s work, eh? Speaking of work… I need to go continue looking for that.