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Unfortunate down-time

Earlier today, Edith was quite innocently using our network to connect from her PC to the server PC to put on some music. Suddenly, both her PC and the server went rather strange, freezing up for around half a second every three seconds or so. The activity lights on both machines’ network ports showed enormous activity, but the system showed no data at all leaving or entering either computer. The internet and network were not accessible from either machine.

Reboots, System Restores, etc. failed miserably, and all the signs point to it being a hardware issue, which is really bizarre – is it even possible for an awkward packet of data to kill the ethernet ports at either end of its path (but not the ports on the hub halfway along its path)? The server had another port, which I’ve enabled, but I’ve now rediscovered the reason why I had disabled it and used the other one in the first place – it drops the connection after an hour or so and you have to disable and re-enable it – fabulous.

So the upshot of all this overly detailed technical moaning is that the server is currently sadly incapacitated, and will probably remain so for the next several days, meaning that the main zoolyweds site will have to be offline until it’s sorted out. I suppose if you happen to go there when I’ve just fixed the connection it’ll be fine, for an hour, but don’t hold your breath. Apologies for the inconvenience, etc., etc. Of course, it could be more inconvenient for you – you could have just had half your networking capability taken out by an inexplicable occurrence.

00:51 update

I’ve found an old USB-ethernet adapter, so hopefully the site will stay online now after all. I did manage to snap the port in half in the process of setting it up, but a bit of cardboard and a lot of sticky tape have sorted that out. What an exciting night it’s been… I look forward to finally getting some sleep now.