Personal: Did I anger the Internet Gods?

I think I must have angered the Internet Gods yesterday some how. I got back from work and, as is my habit, instantly came upstairs to check my email. I’ve actually got my various email accounts spread out on 6 servers – 2 are for work-related email (i.e. I was ‘given’ the addresses by my employer), 1 is my Hotmail account, 1 is my Yahoo account and then I’ve got my two “main” accounts. One is hosted on my main ADSL dialup ISP and the other on my dedicated server which runs my website. Anyway, I got home and went to check my email – ping, ping, bang. My ISPs mail server was suffering overloading/technical issues and I was unable to pick up my mail v ia POP3. They eventually acknowledged the problem at 9.30pm, but didn’t get the hardware failure fixed until 2.30pm today. So, I was without my major email practically all day (I had over 600 waiting for me when I collected it today).

Ok, so I can just cope with my own mail server, ok I may be missing out on some emails sent to my ISP hosted domain but I’ve still got two way email access. Or so I thought. Come 1.30am in the morning (don’t ask!), the server is suddenly unreachable. I’m unable to access my email, my main website or my blog. I run a few tests and find out they’ve had a router failure. I send them an email via my Hotmail account and then decide what to do. The router was down for 419 minutes according to my log files – that means my web server was unavailable for nearly 7 hours 🙁

Usually when I get some free time, I go and do some editing over at the Open Directory Project – but I couldn’t last night. The ODP server has been suffering from overloading issues for around a fortnight now (getting to the point where editors were finding it impossible to edit) and so the ODP staff scheduled a bit of down time to move all the internal editor forums on to a new server and change the port number that ODP editors use for editing (to help reduce the load on the Apache server). Guess when this downtime happened? Yep, last night…

So, there I was without any thing useful to do and no useful email access (I thought I had covered my “bases” by having two totally separate mail servers on totally separate internet backbones, but observably not) – I could have used my Hotmail or Yahoo accounts but I try and keep those for emergency use and for WAP usage. I’d love to know what I did to cause the internet to hate me so much then. Heh.

Today, at work, I had to arrange a hosting server upgrade which involved me transferring all of a customers files from one of our servers to another one: usually you can just copy direct from one box to another, but one server was UK based, the other US and intervening firewalls stopped direct transfers. So I had to download all the files (12Mb) to my desktop machine and then re-upload them to the new server. This was 10 minutes before I was due to finish work. Despite actually starting half-an-hour earlier than I was doing (as my boss changed my working hours), I still finished at the same time – plus I skipped lunch as I was busy. If I didn’t like the job so much I might have asked him to pay me for an hours overtime 😉

Anyway, after several prayers and offerings to Isidore Of Seville (the Patron Saint of Computer Users and the Internet), the Gods decided to look down on me favourably and everything has worked perfectly tonight. If anything, a little too perfectly. The “Guess That Movie” competition has really started rolling – 4 movies were correctly identified today: and I only had a “prepared stash” of 3 images. Practically as soon as I got home I had to start taking more screenshots of various movies. There’s now picture number 10 on the site and I’ve got another 3 on standby. Hopefully the next few will take a while to guess – only 2 of the 4 (the live one and the three standbys) have an actors face in them. I’m actually in the process of setting up a separate site for the “Guess That Movie” competition (I was actually in the process of registering the domain names yesterday before things went tits-up), so that’ll be “yet another site I’m administrating” (I personally own 9 domain names and I’m partly responsibly for around 1,000 domains hosted by my employer).

On the same score, with the main DMOZ server being unavailable (the mirror at ch.dmoz.org was still working, but editors just couldn’t do anything) the “Public forum” at Resource Zone was extremely busy – I logged in this evening and I’m still trying to catch up with all the unread messages!

Anyway, I’m full of pizza, full of cola and beginning to get tired. I’ve just got to send a fax off to my DNS registry for them to make a few changes to their records and then I’m off to slumberland….