(no subject)

[feren]

My personal server started acting flakey again, just to remind me that servers need attention too. I noticed the problem at 10:40 or so and was able to get logged back in by simple dumb luck. Thinking I might be able to head this problem off at the pass by giving it a little reboot love I issued the command at 1100. Guess what? It's 1138 now and still no sign of it being back. I sent in a support request to ValueWeb, and maybe if they power-cycle it physically the darn thing will rise from the grave.

I'm really tired of this. I'm tired of people being dependent upon "my" equipment for services. I'm tired of wrestling with supporting a piece of hardware that's over a thousand miles away. I'm tired of paying $60 a month for a machine that crashes as frequently as this one does, especially when I can't actually do anything to fix it. Mostly I'm just tired, period. Maybe I should hang up my hat, get a HotMail account like everyone else and stop playing service-provider. I'll save money and have a hell of a lot less hassle.

In other frustrating but equally unimportant news: the guy over at Barrett's Antenna & Service still hasn't fixed my Onkyo receiver. He's done some troubleshooting, identified there's a heavy draw on the 12v bus, but doesn't know what's causing it ... so can't fix it yet. I also got a call from the siding contractor -- the replacement fascia for Z'ha'dum has been ordered but won't be here until the 29th of March at the earliest because of the unique color.

I think I'll go sit in the Expedition and listen to some Blue Man Group during lunch, or maybe go drive around town for a little bit.

Comments

[frostyw.livejournal.com]

I got to the same point. I kinda lost interest in serving content, but I continue to do some minor things because there are fallbacks in place, and because I shudder at the thought of letting people control these things I've done since the beginning. I was gung-ho into web serving before, now I couldn't care less. When I eventually get a G5, it will assume all of meeko's tasks as well as my desktops and just be one computer instead of two taking up space in my otherwise cramped room.

Hotmail's not bad, but it had some downtime last week. I find .Mac to be fairly reliable, and it comes with a suite of services, but it's $100/yr and really works best with various Mac digital-hub apps, anyway.

I don't remember that panther really had any significant problems before you sent it down to ValueWeb. A shame you don't have static IP addressing where you are. Covad would have worked out great, because most of their pro packages include a bundle of static IP addresses, if it wasn't for the grand failure of telcos wanting everything for themselves. :/

[yotogi.livejournal.com]

Loscil.

[rustitobuck.livejournal.com]

Do they have any idea what's going on with it? I have two servers at ValueWeb, a Cobalt RaQ that has been up for 285 days, and a $99/month RedHat Linux box that's been up for 56 days.

We had to bounce the Linux box once, but really, the boxes have been pretty reliable. I think the RaQ has been up continuously from the day I leased it.

Sometimes the network latency is farqed, and most of the time, it's upstream of ValueWeb somewhere.

Maybe they need to get you a new box.

[ronbar.livejournal.com]

I gave up on the amateur sysadmin game in 1998, even before I got a cable modem that would have arguably worked a lot better for running my own services at home. I used to run apache (for both http and https), ftpd, a WTnet ircd, the works. But then I moved, got a better job where I had to do that shit all day at work, and just got a yahoo mail account like a normal person and shut everything else off.

Being a sysadmin at work isn't bad-- automating the boring stuff is always a challenge. But when I get home, sysadmin is a means to a few very simple ends, including web browsing, playing games, and paying bills (which is a subset of web browsing and also involves scanning and printing).

Unfortunately, Lee has been tempting me to get back into the amateur sysadmin game with Asterisk. Dammit!

Maybe if Verizon actually lives up to their big fiber-to-the-premises talk or offers VoIP-over-DSL, or Comcast doesn't charge rapacious telephone rates...

[feren.livejournal.com]

Baz... in thirty words or less, tell me why you need to run a PBX in your home.