ISP troubles

October 29, 2008 D. H. McKee

Off

The website was offline for a couple of days. Here’s how things went down:
My ISP was switching upstream providers, and as a result, required IP address changes on all its machines. The changeover happened at 10pm EST Sunday night, and I altered my name server entries around that time, in anticipation of the change.
However, the new provider had some routing issues, and the machines were not actually online or accessible until Monday at noon. I hope someone got in trouble for that. One of our machines came back online right away at that point, but my webserver failed to come back up. I could ping it, but no SSH or webserver access. I guessed there were problems with the services or maybe a firewall issue. We had a person on-site to reboot the machine.
Except he rebooted the wrong machine. Now, I know some people might not know the difference between a 2-U and a 4-U machine, so I mentioned that the machine I wanted rebooting was about a handspan tall, when viewing from the front of the rack. That wasn’t an apt description, apparently, as the working server went offline for a few minutes.
By 3pm Tuesday, a sysadmin was available to fix the machine; the same guy who changed the IPs in the first place. It was indeed a firewall issue, and he wasn’t aware I was using a firewall (which begs the question: what was he using?).
So the machine’s back up, and I’m just hammering out some of the bugs in DNS.

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About This Site

As a guy who occasionally curates art shows and wrangles artists together, I often have to edit and post artist bios, profile pictures, and artwork images. This can be a problem, since many artists and writers aren’t used to selling themselves. Artists rarely know how to present their art for display in a brochure, and writers aren’t used to writing about themselves.

Writers often treat the bio like it’s an interview or something. Maybe like they’re having a conversation with you, the reader. While it may work sometimes, the most common way to write a bio is to write in the 3rd person.

I’m like those writers, and I’m talking to you directly, unlike the common way to do a bio. You should see my About page. It makes sense to me, since this is a bit which describes my blog’s website. When I get famous enough that I don’t have time to talk to you, I’ll have an intern write everything in 3rd person. Until then, you get to talk to me.

Like blogs of old, this one is a personal document of the comings and goings of me. Articles I’ve written, links I’ve posted, videos I liked, etc. Here, a first-person perspective is the way to go, at least for now. So, this is my site. I’m D. H. McKee, a sometimes artist, sometimes writer. Mostly just a guy on the internet.