The Hangover

Once again, pcweenies.com was down for the count, when it mattered the most. I’m not quite sure why one of my WP files had extensive CPU access on my host’s server, but I’m pretty disappointed with how long it took for my trouble ticket to be addressed.

The nuts and bolts of what happened yesterday is:

1) Yesterday morning, two files on my server were apparently generating 30% CPU on Lunarpages’ server.

2) The two files were chmod’d to root. Fair enough. But at this point, I couldn’t do anything on my end to fix the problem.

3) It took over 12 hours, and 2 phone calls to get those files’ permissions changed back. The two support personnel I spoke with informed me that only a systems administrator could change the permissions.

4) Looking at the daily log files, I was still getting an Internal Server Error. The GID of my index.php file was different than what the database expected.

5) Frustrated with this whole debacle, I called it a night.

6) This morning, after talking with Frumph, I went ahead and uploaded a fresh copy of the index.php file from the latest WP I downloaded. BAM!
That worked.

I can’t promise any more server weirdness, but I assure you that I’m working on a Plan “B”. More on that later.

In the meantime, I’m extending the Caption Contest through to Sunday. On Monday, if all goes well, I’ll be running some guest-strips by some very talented cartoonists.

-Krishna

Krishna October 23, 2008