So here’s what I put up with today, typical…

• my electric utility decides to install a new meter at my house
• my wife gets the notice on the way out the door that they’ll be ripping out the old meter, dropping the power
• right after she leaves, we have a 2 minute power outage
• I’m at work, Andrea’s out, no one home to reset the PC, which has powered down and stayed down
• I finally get home after 9 hours of downtime, have 10 seconds before soccer practice to get things humming
• turn the PC back on, BIOS locks up on splash screen
• I kick, I prod, I have nightmares of a complete rebuild, I pray, I finally physically unplug the thing from the wall to get BIOS to behave
• I call Andrea, she’s running late returning with Reiley for soccer practice, so I have an extra 20 seconds
• Linux uses its journaling to patch up the filesystems (nice); of course it also wants to do a full drive scan (ugg)
• Eth0 doesn’t come up, I look at the network cards, and see that the “picky” one decided not to come alive
• I turn off the PC, fire it up, several times, to see if the bad card starts behaving, no luck
• I power it off, open it up, pop out the network card, and dust it off; I pop it back in, power on, and it works; can’t decide if I’m really happy or really pissed
• have to run off to soccer!
• back from soccer, apache prompting for password to load SSL certificate (can’t seem to get the auto-password stuff working, rff)
• put in the password, total of 12 or so hours of website downtime (right after asking google adsense to crawl it the night before)
• check the IP, fortunately roadrunner let me keep the same one, whew!

Realtime backups, redundancy, failover… all fantasies I can’t afford…

UPDATE: Lost power in the morning again 2 days later, same basic scenario.

UPDATE: Wow, this one really sucked. Somebody somewhere poisoned DNS records so that my main domain name pointed to a “revenue generator” – this site that looks like a yahoo index but is really a list of advertisers. I noticed this at 12:30am, right when I was going to bed. Little guys are pretty powerless against this – I don’t run a DNS server and have no control over anyone else’s except for the “DNS Management” i pay for from my registrar (dotster.com). I can seed my semi-static IP, and they update their DNS server. It usually takes 24 hours to propogate. When I saw the problem, I emailed dotster and they admitted they were having problems. It was fixed in a short amount of time. But it was a bit humbling – the internet really is a inter-dependent community. I use a DNS server of my ISP (RoadRunner). I suppose RoadRunner could decide that they will not allow DNS records that point to their internal network (which mine does), so I am grateful that things generally work for me.

Here is the poisoned DNS information, from RoadRunner’s DNS server and from Dotster’s.

Hello Dotster!

Looks like someone is hijacking my domain name with bogus DNS records?

——————–
> [root@thedigitalmachine ~]# nslookup
> thedigitalmachine.com
Server: 24.25.5.150
Address: 24.25.5.150#53

Non-authoritative answer:
thedigitalmachine.com canonical name = wc.traffic.puredns.com.
wc.traffic.puredns.com canonical name = wc.funnel.revenuedirect.com.akadns.net.
Name: wc.funnel.revenuedirect.com.akadns.net
Address: 69.25.47.165
——————–

My IP is 71.70.165.69.

Even your nameservers are returning the bogus “canonical name”. Help! TIA…

———————–
[root@thedigitalmachine ~]# nslookup
> server ns1.nameresolve.com
Default server: ns1.nameresolve.com
Address: 64.94.117.196#53
> thedigitalmachine.com
Server: ns1.nameresolve.com
Address: 64.94.117.196#53

thedigitalmachine.com canonical name = wc.traffic.puredns.com.
Name: thedigitalmachine.com
Address: 71.70.165.69
>
——————–

UPDATE: Holy host-horror, Batman!  It was Dotster.  Sounds like they were to blame, and also responsible for the fix.  Hrmph.

Registrant:
Dotster.com
8100 NE Parkway Drive
Suite 300
Vancouver, WA 98662
US
Registrar: DOTSTER
Domain Name: REVENUEDIRECT.COM
Created on: 28-FEB-04
Expires on: 28-FEB-08
Last Updated on: 18-NOV-05
Administrative, Technical Contact:
, Dotster Inc. REVENUEDIRECT.COMmdi19A@privacypost.com
Dotster.com
8100 NE Parkway Drive
Suite 300
Vancouver, WA 98662
US
360-253-2210
360-253-4234

Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.PUREDNS.COM
NS2.PUREDNS.COM
End of Whois Information