Car is Back, Another Late Night
Looks like the car just needed a new battery. My massive thanks again to ?ryk for running me to the hardware store and then home with my bike in the back of his little hatchback. A bit of monkeying around to throw the battery in and she’s back. Lets not even think about the possibility that it has something to do with the alternator ok?
Anyway after that and a really tasty pasta and meatball dinner, it was sitting in front of the computer completing contract work. The “oh, it’s just 2 things” went to “oh, and they want to to this” and “oh, this is needed as well”. At 2am things were all done, tested and working so I hit the hay.
I woke up this morning to my cell phone ringing… $contract_client telling me that $client_site was down. Ugh. Ok, run downstairs, can I log in, yup, ok, can I get to the site? Nope, ok, look deeper. Ah, the server came up with only one IP address set. Tell $contract_client what the problem was and to talk to $hosting_company to fix it.
Got a call back with $tech_support guy on the line and re-explained the problem. The guy didn’t give me a whole vibe of confidence. The conversation went something like this:
Me: For some reason the server rebooted last night and the issue is that the server normally comes up with ipaddresses of xx.230 to xx.237, and it’s currently only coming up with the first IP.
Tech Dude: Hmm…. so how are you seeing this?
Me: Uhmm… “ifconfig” [thinks… this is a standard linux network tool since the beginning of time, you’re in the unix support department?]
TD: Ah, ok… hm…. so what is it that you’re looking at specifically?
Me: [boggle] The output that has the list of IP addresses only lists xx.230, not the other 7 that it normally comes up with
TD: Oh. Please hold on.
[Time passes… if this were a movie there would be several slow cuts with fades of my dejected face on my desk, staring at the phone]
TD: Ok, it’s fixed now.
Me: What did you do so that I can know for next time.
TD: [Slowly enunciating] service ipalias start
Me: Ok, that makes sense. Any idea why it didn’t come back up by itself?
TD: Not really
End result though it’s all good, wasn’t our fault, just really bad timing.
heh, I remember my old DSL ISP.. their staff were all really, really technical. I’d call in and say “Hey, I swapped out the nic on my ip_masq box, but the arp cache on your router still has the old MAC address.. can you flush it for me?” and they’d actually know what I was talking about.
These days, I call Comcast and have zero expectation of talking to anyone with more than 3 functioning brain cells. Fortunately we haven’t had any problems for a while (fingers crossed).