Administrative Woes

A quick apology to all visitors who had trouble accessing this site (or the several others I host) today for a variety of reasons. This afternoon, my pipe to the outside world (a.k.a. the internet) was severed and stayed down for several hours. My provider seemed to be under the impression that I was imagining things, and was in no hurry to fix it, despite the fact that my telephone service operates on the same pipe, and was quite unmistakably dead!

After that, I decided to do some nice, easy, routine (is it getting ominous yet?) maintenance on the server. The tough stuff (upgrading the kernel) went just fine, but somehow I ended up "upgrading" to a package containing an Apache binary that would not stay alive for more than a few seconds. That and the fact that all CGI scripts were rendered inoperable made things a bit tricky. That took another hour just now to straighten out, and I apologize for the inconvenience. A patron (and family member) of the site called me to see if I was asleep at the wheel (my words, not his), but he happened to catch me 5 minutes before it was all back in one piece.

No further maintenance is scheduled in the near future! Then again, I wasn't planning to do this tonight...