[Sysadmin] tempest dead?

[Dean Mah]

On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 1:28 PM, David Kaufman <david at gigawatt.com> wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> "John Handelaar" <john at userfrenzy.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hm.  For future reference, I'm don't think that a reboot is ever the
>> first resort.  And certainly not when >1 people from sysadmin can
>> usually be found on IRC.
>>
>> jh
>
> The number of people on irc notwithstanding, I took Dean's "Might need to
> request a reboot" to mean that, with the web site down, the server
> unreachable via ssh and not responding to pings, that a reboot was in order.
>  And I agreed.  Not being on irc that appeared to me to be enough consensus.
>
> Since none of us have physical access the only other option is to report a
> server outage to the techs at The Planet and have them go plug in a monitor
> and take a look-see at the console.  In hindsight, I suppose I should have
> done that, except:
>
> 1. I'm never sure if they're going to charge us dozens of dollars an hour
> for tech time, or how long they will take to respond
>
> 2. It seems that I'm the only one who's able (or perhaps no one else is
> willing) to login to the account to request reboots open tickets.
>
> 3. it seemed likely that a reboot would get us back up and running with a
> minimum of downtime.
>
> Turned out it did not, and a tech is now investigating anyway.
>
> I hope he is prompt.
>
> And free.
>
> -dave

I was looking for confirmation that the server was not just broken for
me.  I checked IRC first.  Twitter'ed second.  E-mail sysadmin third.
Dave concurred that the server was unreachable and I think rebooting
was correct.  Turns out that the server was unresponsive from the
console as well so there's not likely anything else to be done.

I was going to log a ticket after I got confirmation that the server
was dead and dug out my login information, so don't feel totally
abandoned Dave.  :)

Luckily, with neuro working on the migration of b.e.o and related
sites, and me grabbing the wiki, we're close to decommissioning this
machine.  I would think that we can get it done before the end of
January.

Dean