Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2004 11:36 pm

Chiara and I are back from vacation. It was nice, but when we got back we found that all of our servers here at our house had crashed the day after we left. Apparently our house sitter turned up the heat too high and the servers all got too hot and crashed.

This included our email server which I had set up to "autoreply" and send vacation messages to anyone who sent us an email. So, nobody who sent us email in the last 2 weeks got any reply.

To make matters worse, apparently there was a big hole in PHPBB and someone got access to the "nobody" account and started a denial of service attack. Fortunately, Dale at Wolfpaw was proactive and went into the zuggsoft server and updated our PHPBB software to fix the problem.

The only side effect was that when the server was restarted, the SSL was not activated, so none of our HTTPS pages were accessible. This caused all PayPal orders to fail since the script that generates reg codes for PayPal orders runs in HTTPS mode.

I don't know why this kind of stuff always happens. Stuff runs fine for months and months and then dies the day after you leave for vacation.

If I had still been using the Superb hosting company, they would have suspended our account as soon as the quota on the email server was exceeded (which only takes about a day). Instead, Dale had the email server at Wolfpaw set up to handle all of our backlog even if our local server here fails (which it did). So, even though we didn't send out any "on vacation" messages, we didn't lose any emails.

So, curses to "Murphy" and the Gremlins that caused all of the problems. But kudos to Dale at Wolfpaw for proactively taking action on the server to prevent these problems from affecting our customers.

After replying to our current email backlog, Chiara and I will close the office again for Christmas. Then I'll be back to programming on Jan 2nd. At least we'll be home to keep an eye on the computers, which, of course, will work fine while we are watching them.

Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2004 11:37 pm

Oh, apparently Dale's update to PHPBB blew away the changes made by the WebLog MOD. I just spent a couple of hours fixing that. I had to re-type this blog entry 3 times and edit a bunch of PHP files before it finally worked. What an annoying day it's been today.

Posted: Wed Dec 22, 2004 3:46 pm

Seeing you brought it up...

http://www.breakingnewsblog.com/discoveries/murphys_law_calculator.php

Have a GREAT Holiday Season!