The server was out for a wee bit there, but now it appears to be back, so whatever Jaeger and Scott did must have worked.

Late Monday night, after talking with Nemo and Yanthor into the wee hours, and I tried to retrieve email before bed, I noticed it was down, but felt too tired to do anything, and incapable of it anyway.

Tuesday morning, still down. Hmmmmm. Time to start worrying. I decided to temporarily move operations over to livejournal, as I had no idea what the problem was or how long it would last.

Eventually, curiosity got the better of me, and I tried using my calling card to dial scott's number. In the event of a hardware failure, I strongly doubted I was going to be able to be much help at this distance, but I wanted to know what was going on. His voicemail answered. Oh well. Nothing I can do anyway.

Fast forward a couple hours. About 15 minutes before it was time for me to leave for work, Anya came and informed me that Scott had left a message on their machine. Hmmmm...

I tried calling him again, and this time got an answer. He told me, in short, that there was a motherboard failure, he had transfered the hard drive to a machine with a new motherboard, and was trying to get network drivers working.

I briefly coached him through compiling what sounded like the necessary kernel modules, said "Good luck with that on the reboot," and headed out to work.

When I arrived back in the evening, it appeared to be intermittently responding to pings, but refusing connections on all ports. I took this to mean that progress was being made, and decided my time would be put to best use sitting back and listening to the new Sarah Fimm cd, which had just arrived in the mail.

(Somehow, the idea of spending the evening using up my calling card minutes and/or running up Yanthor's long distance bill while trying to be a backseat driver didn't hold strong appeal.)

Insomnia strikes, I'm awake again at 3am, and everything seems to be back up!

I think I'll take this opportunity to do what I should have done a long time ago: A cron job to backup my database every night so that next time, if there is a real hard drive failure, I won't lose everything I've posted since the last time I bothered to do it manually.