Ben Benner’s Blog

My beloved server that is hosted in up in Dallas, TX, suffered a nearly fatal injury today.

From looking into the logs at about 4am this morning (central time), Jules went offline.

Jeremy informed me that Hashserver was offline around 1pm or so and I went to log into Jules, he was not reachable. Not SSH nor Ping could find this wayward web serving warrior, he was gone.

I feared the worst, that his motherboard had fried or that he had finally blown-out his one and only hard disk drive or HDD as someone extra nerdy might say.

I called into support, hoping that by some off-chance the hosting company (Sprocket Networks) was having some unscheduled maintenance that had taken this blog and my server Jules offline.

I was greeted by a very friendly voice, who stated his name was Josh. He said he would go and take a look at my server and see what was had occurred.

He called me back relatively quickly and informed me that Jules’ power supply was gone, it had given up the 300W ghost, yes apparently the power supply was only 300W, craziness right?

I inquired about having Jules shipped back to me so that I could get some data off him and put him to rest like the good little server he has been, by which I mean take him down to Goodwill Computers for recycling.

He advised me to open a ticket with billing and let them quote me on replacing the power supply and that he thinks it would only cost me about $30 to get Jules all patched up.

I opened the ticket with Billing and was informed that all I needed to do was supply them with a replacement 250W power supply and that was that, no additional fees. ($27.99 on Amazon, with free 2-day shipping and Sprocket will soon have their new shiny 250W power supply.)

However, as it would happen, I for the life of me could not remember my password. Now, I can just see my wife laughing herself to death, as this isn’t entirely uncommon for me to forget a password. However, I have like 6 or 7 regular password that I rotate through.

I tried those and various potential variations that I could think of, but no luck. I called Josh back and asked him if he could please reset my root password.

He helped me out and got me a new root password, and I was able to restart the Apache engine and start writing this blog post.

And with that, I must now get back to the grind. But I want everyone to know that Sprocket Networks in Dallas, remains to be one of the best Colo/Hosting companies I have ever known.

Laterz

bdbenner Uncategorized hosting, jules, Power Supply, problems, Sprocket

I have setup a couple of blogs on WordPress.com and have found that the custom domain blogs are very reasonably priced and I don’t have to worry about my beloved server Jules dying (a computer that I built in 2003 for $400 and have been hosting in a Dallas based Colo for about 3 years now), Wordpress.com will have all my blog data backed up. (In terms of Pics, since moving to WordPress, I have tried to keep all my photos on flickr.com, as I knew the day would come where I would need to move my blog off Jules and I just didn’t want to deal with transferring photos, not to mention that should I have a really, really popular photo or blog post, the potential issues on bandwidth are mitigated by hosting those images over on flickr.com

I still need to figure out what I am going to do with my Technosnobs.com blog, as it is in serendipity, need to see about importing it into Wordpress. I will likely move Hashserver.com over to Vincent, but I am giving serious notion to spinning up an Amazon EC2 instance, need to give Cloud Computing a try.

I am in the process right now of registering my Ben.Dominguez-Benner.com domain on WordPress.com.

So the next blog post that I make should be on WordPress.com, of course I don’t think anyone should really notice.

I did want to point out that one of other reasons (aside from Jules potentially dying) is that I bought an iPad, and want to use the WordPress app, which would require me to upgrade my install of WordPress, not something I really want to bother with.

Laterz

bdbenner Personal hosting, ipad, jules, vincent, wordpress

It might be closer to 40, but regardless.

My beloved little server “Jules” who sits on a shelf in a colo in Dallas, had a hiccup today.

I still don’t know exactly what happened, but something caused him to go ‘dark’.

Thankfully the folks over at SprocketNetworks are fantastic, specifically Josh.

THANKS JOSH!

I have not had a problem with Jules in quite, quite a long time. If memory served and I should have gotten a snapshot of this. Jules had been online for over a year.

Things seems to be back to normal. Replacing Jules has come to mind. I am torn between something completely virtual, like Amazon’s EC2 or replacing him with a new box.

I am going to crunch the numbers and see what the best solution is.

Laterz, time to eat.

bdbenner Technology, amazon amazon, colo, ec2, hosting, jules, servers, sprocket networks