For a start I would like to apologise to everyone for the server being offline yesterday. I woke up and everything was fine in “serverland” and as normal I sat down at my desk to begin another day’s work to suddenly have all hell break loose.

My server that has been working faithfully for years suddenly decided to reboot itself. In itself this is really annoying but over the course of thirty minutes it did it intermittently at roughly 5 minute intervals. My mind instantly leapt to the thought of hackers and other malevolent sources of IT skulduggery and like a good IT guru myself I did the only prudent thing that I thought made sense.....I called for help!

With both my brother-in-law and I on the case and my hosting company working in the background we found that it wasn’t hackers but tracked down the problem to a faulty power supply. Let me assure you that it was very frustrating being booted off the server every 5 minutes as we tracked down the issue! That was actually good news as it was a problem that should have been instantly solvable.

The hosting company agreed with the diagnoses and replaced the power supply and all was good for about 2 hours and then the same problem occurred. Grrrrrrrr! To cut a long involved technical story short it turns out that it was the power supply and the mother board that was having problems.

Where is the good news in all of this? The entire server has now been replaced and has double the memory and about 50 times the speed of the original. This mean everything should be working a lot faster! About 2 months ago I replaced the server software and now at long last the hardware has made way.

I plan on making a more scheduled outage in the next few weeks as I would like to setup two servers that share the load so that if one fails the site will remain alive and well. Cost willing, I think that Downwind really deserves this treatment and I a lot less stress!

As an aside, I’m convinced that travelling around the Internet are little gremlins that just love to mess with people’s lives. When you least expect it a gremlin pounces and wipes out 12 hours of your life.....my advice after all of this is to watch out for the gremlins! :-)

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written by Patrick Ruddell, July 29, 2009

Sorry to hear about your server issues. Glad things are back up.

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