Kelly’s World has been down since I left on vacation on Wednesday. Of course my faithful readers (Hi Mom!) have my sincere apologies. From what I can see, my main network switch crashed within hours of us getting in my car. I have no real explanation for the failure other than some sort of digital empathy relating to the buyer’s remorse I feel regarding the DI-LB604 I bought a couple of months or so ago. I am wondering if the firmware update I did on that switch a few days before we left is at the root of the failure. Sometime soon I’m going to write a blog entry regarding my fun during the past few months regarding my network configuration, but today is not the day to start that…
This kind of outage is something I suppose would not happen if I was using a paid hosting service instead of running my website from my home. There was a time that I did use professional hosting, but I moved everything to my own server in order to permit things like hosting my own game server, choosing my own versions of MySql and PHP, and generally being able to play with a small Linux box in my own home. The downside- if something as crucial as my network switch fails, I have limited (or no) options to correct the problem remotely. I’ve been working on getting basic network redundancy in place by using two ISPs and some sort of fail over/load balancing solution… but the switch that seems to have crashed was at the core of that solution.
In any case, I believe I have things working again. And I have a new switch that I ordered for unrelated reasons shortly before we left on vacation waiting for me to pick it up, so hopefully I’ll be able to eliminate the weak link in my network shortly.
