Downtime

As you may have already heard, us poor San Francisco dwellers suffered a big power outage yesterday. Our hosting provider was affected and for some reason the magic backup generators failed to kick in. Probably gremlins. Some very big sites were taken down as well, including Craigs List, Technorati, LiveJournal, and Typepad. The hosting facility was completely swamped for a few hours yesterday, and couldn't get splendora.com back up just by restarting our servers.

So after many hours of back and forth with the hosting company, yours truly hops in the batmobile (also known as the #12 bus) and heads down there. By the time I arrived, the madness had slowed a bit, and I was able to get through the security station quickly. I ride the elevator up to our floor biting my nails in anticipation. Has this blackout killed splendora?! Oh no!! So I arrive at my cabinet and wipe the sweat from my brow. Phew well at least all the computers seem to be running! I plug in a monitor and can see that they all came up just fine. Except the one. The one that would cause *everything* to stop working: our firewall. This quiet little machine sits around all day doing nothing but protecting splendora.com from bad guys. And I've gone and neglected it for so long! After 2 minutes of poking around I found a backup of the firewall configuration. Copy the file into place, restart, and bang Splendora is back! Yay!

I look around me and see 3 other teams working on their servers who weren't so lucky. They appear to have been standing there for hours and were not happy at all when I fixed Splendora in moments.

The moral of this story kids, is back up everything no matter how unimportant or trivial it seems.

So we're back now, bringing you the fashion and gossip of the day. Never fear, fletch is here! Enjoy.

Hugs & Kisses

--fletch