It seems I don’t need the help of others to take my site offline. When I got to work today, I discovered that I was unable to read my private e-mail. Yes, I read private e-mail at work. Nor was I able to access this site, or the server it’s hosted on via SSH. I was able to ping the ISP gateway in my living room, so the network connection was OK.

So, after work, I got home, restarted the box and everything was online again in a matter of seconds; the Ubuntu Server startup time is very, very low. Unfortunately, I was not able to find anything about the incident in the logs, the last thing that happened was that the Amazon S3 backup started. That might of course be the problem, but it has been running for a while without any problems.

My best guess is that the VIA CPU on the motherboard and the Linux kernel isn’t the best of friends. I’ve had problems with the same CPU model before when using Debian, so I’m guessing that’s the most likely cause. A few weeks ago I ordered a new Mini-ITX motherboard with an embedded Intel Atom based CPU, and that CPU should be 100% compatible with the kernel and it’ll arrive in about two weeks time.

Until then, if the site is offline, there’s no need to panic! It’ll surface again shortly. Also, if you sent me any e-mail from 07:00 to 17:15 CET today, it’s probably a good idea to send it again. Your SMTP server should retry for at least 48 hours if the recipient server is unavailable, but you never know.

Now I’m getting some dinner and then it’s off to the gym, meaning I have to take the bus back to work to go to the gym there. Being a web host provider sure is hard work!