Downtime

On the 16th of May this machine went down to be moved to a new location.

I elected to get up on a Sunday morning to help move and troubleshoot any problems. Unfortunately I was there for a couple of hours and still the main router at pannuhuone wasn’t up, so I left for lunch and prayed my machine would come up. It didn’t for almost a week. Here’s why:

• I switched to a stock kernel and forgot to `echo via-rhine >> /etc/modules`, so the NIC driver didn’t load and the interface didn’t come up!
• The DNS control panel at domainmonger and gandi SUCKS
• DNS changes take upto 2 days to propagate. Oh fantastic. So if you’ve made a mistake, wait 4 days…
• Apache of course can’t serve until it can dig the domain. You need to restart it once it can.
• I didn’t realise that the old IP address was in the httpd.conf and I forgot to change it (NameVirtualHost)
• pannuhuone was really slow to update the PTR record for daidalos.pannuhuone.org which a ton of stuff relies on
• Finally I forgot to `sudo dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config`, reconfigure exim MTA.