Wadda Ya Do?

Wadda ya do? I was just patting myself on the back the other day and thinking about how well my Web servers were running. Purring along, memory stable, no 100% CPU usage, no middle of the night pages reminding me that a Webmaster's life is not *all* that easy.

All of a sudden, out'a the blue, I get beeped. 6:30 AM. I waited 10 minutes to make sure it wasn't a glitch, you know, a stuck router, or worse yet a broke router. No, no glitch, 10 minutes later I got beeped again. I crawled out'a bed and slowly walked to my home office (I guess I could'a booted my wireless laptop which was two feet from my bed, but at the time it just seemed like more work to me) and clicked my browser open. All my test Web pages came up without a problem. Hmmm, oh well, back to bed, for a half hour at least, the kids wake up at 7 am.

A half hour later, beeped again. Again I crawled to my office clicked on my browser. Page not Found? Not only my pages weren't found but no pages from any sites came up. Apparently I had lost all Internet access. Darn DSL!

Ok, next step, start up the old modem. After a few loud screeches and squeals (I miss that) the old modem connects and wallah...still no access to my Web server. Hmmm, other sites resolve. Ok, I call the data center and they inform me that, yes, in fact, there is a network outage and the engineers are working on the problem. Should be fixed in 15 minutes they say.

Ok, I wait. Sure enough, 15 minutes later everything is working fine. I relax, but not for long. About a half hour later I cannot access one of my servers. Terminal servicing into my backup server tells me that at least the network is up but the primary server is down. Darn! When it rains it pours. I call the engineers in the data center and have someone plug a monitor into the server to get a reading. They report back that everything looked fine. About that time as well I can now connect to the primary server.

Hmmm, this doesn't seem right. I was glad though, glad that it wasn't a blue screen of death, but not for long. Upon close examination of the event viewer I see that the server went down unexpectedly at 6:19 and at 7:24 that morning. No events pointing to SCSI disk errors, memory faults, nothing. Not even a Doc Watson memory dump to look at, not that any extensive examination of it would point me closer to the problem, but maybe, just maybe, I'd get lucky. Maybe inside the memory dump it would provide some hint, in English, of a lead I could follow. No, nothing.

So, wadda ya do? Hardware? Probably. But what part. What would you do?

Darn!