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Ohloh profile for crazedsanity
Unexpected Downtime
Tuesday, April 07, 2009 10:23 PM

It seems that CrazedSanity.com (and BuzzKill.org) has been unavailable for a few days.  I'd like to just update everybody on what actually happened.

First off, the servers have been online during the whole time.  The problem turned out to be that the IP address that my router had been assigned from our local ISP had changed, so my DNS servers (which are sadly attached to that IP) weren't accessible.  The IP address that they had given out and that other DNS servers had cached was still the old one, so they were trying to contact my webserver somewhere that it didn't exist.

So you're probably wondering, "Why did it take so long for you to figure this out, Slaughter?"  There were actually several factors that caused the problem.  First, my contract at the Capitol (ITD) ended on the 31st, so I didn't have my laptop--I didn't get a new laptop until Thursday--so I was pretty much offline for a full day.  Once I did get the laptop, it wasn't configured properly as I'd asked, so I had to spend the rest of that night configuring it (since I had homework, I didn't bother checking the website).  When I saw the website wasn't contactable, I figured it was probably something wonky with how the laptop was configured (it was Windows, after all).

Later I found out that no other machines in the house could get to my website.  Since I'd been tinkering with the router (fiddling with DMZ, port forwarding, and DNS), I figured maybe I'd done something to make stuff in the internal network not be able to lookup the server's address.  The next day I found out that others couldn't bring up my website either. 

Anyway, long story short, my router's IP address changed, so DNS was caching the wrong IP.  Since it couldn't get to my DNS server, it couldn't be corrected.  I changed the IP address associated with my name server, but I found out a day later that the change wasn't actually submitted (thanks, GoDaddy).  I checked it from work today and it worked just fine, which is why you're able to read this message.  :)



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