The beeping started at a bit after 2:30 this morning.

“Logger 2 is DOWN!” read the message on my phone.

“Okay,” I said, and crawled back into bed.

Three minutes later, “Logger 2 is UP!”

“Great,” I said, and crawled back into bed.

Thus began an ordeal that continued until, oddly enough, just about the time I left for work. Every twenty to forty minutes, I’d get a false alarm on either Logger 1 or 2. As you might imagine, after a couple of hours I was losing patience, not to mention any chance at a restful night’s sleep. And in case you’re thinking, “Why didn’t you just turn off the phone?” all I can say is, “And that’d be the exact moment that a real emergency reared its head, and if nobody can reach me during one of those then my head could roll.”

I found the problem, though it wasn’t (specifically) with the Logger computers themselves. Oh, no. It was Servers Alive, which I’d reinstalled recently. The detection timeouts for Loggers 1 and 2 were set to 5 seconds, while Logger 3’s was set to 20 seconds. No wonder I never got a false alarm for #3, eh? What’s more, for some reason Servers Alive had reverted to a check schedule of every three minutes during off-peak weekday hours! Hello? Overkill much? Even worse, the weekend on- and off-peak check intervals were set to every single minute. Ouch.

The timeouts are now set correctly, as are the check intervals. The fixes come too late to get my lost night of sleep back, but at least if my phone beeps at me tonight it probably won’t be a false alarm… I hope.