Mail Server Crash
May 15, 2008
Sometimes I love technology, and sometimes I feel like it conspires against me in an ongoing covert war. Yesterday, Sharalyn, Alexander, and I flew out from Seattle (SeaTac) to Boston. We’re heading out today by car to Sandwich, Massachusetts. We had to leave our house early in the morning, so the last time I had checked email was the night before.
After checking-in at our hotel in Brockton and being off the grid for nearly 24 hours at that point, I tried picking up a wifi signal and checking email. Getting connectivity was easy, but much to my dismay, I found that our mail server (which up until this point had experienced no downtime for nearly a year) had crashed. Joy.
I really need to check-in with how a few things are progressing with work, but that’s not going to happen for a while. I need to wait until about 11:00 AM before Sharalyn can call our next-door neighbor to ask her to go to the data center and reboot the mail server. I have no idea why the sever is offline; I’m hoping it’s just something simple, but I’m worried it could be something significant, maybe a failed hard drive or fried something.
It couldn’t have come at a worst time. Had we been home, I could have hit the machine myself. Worst-case, I could have rebuilt an entirely new mail server and restored from backups in an hour or two.
