Sat Sep 8 18:29:36 PDT 2007

Just when I was about to sign off for the day, suddenly the mail server's down. No response to pings, no response on the console server even. It's an old E220R, and while it's underpowered for all we're asking from it, I haven't had problems with it before. (Well, except for the CDROM drive not powering up. But I can live with that.)

So drive into work with the wife and kid, on the off chance that it'll all be fine quickly. No such luck. It hadn't walked away, the cables were all still in place, and I had to power cycle it to get it to come back up. A lot of fscking later, and I'm waiting for it to finish booting. I can't remember what it was like the last time I rebooted it, but this time it seems rather ridiculous (20 minutes). More stuff to add to the documentation once I'm done…

And once more: sysadmin documentation MUST NOT depend on external services. (The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.)

Time for pizza.

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Comment from "Warren Guy"
Date: Sun, 9 Sep 2007 15:31:55 +0800

Re: Mail server

I can attest to your last point from experience: sysadmin documentation stored in your Wiki in a MySQL database is suddenly no longer particularly useful when the MySQL server goes down :)