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There is nothing quite like a monumental computing cock-up to destroy one's plans for an evening.
I have a server, a homebuilt Pentium 4 running Linux, situated in a rack in Sovereign House, a server colocation facility in the London Docklands. It's a secure facility, which means I can't get there myself without making an appointment and coming during working hours. (And I live miles from that part of London, anyway -- it would take me at least a couple of hours to get there.)
I have just spent the best part of four hours talking to my ISP (the people who provide the rack space and network), because I made a slip and specified the wrong location for my root (system) partition in the partition configuration file (fstab). I carried out a routine remote reboot, and waited for the system to come back up again.
And waited, and waited ... and waited some more.
It is one of the most ominous feelings in the world when a much-relied upon server (responsible for my email, my web site, and those of half a dozen other people) fails to resurrect itself, for though one usually has an idea why that might have been, one can never be sure. Has a hard disk failed? Has the power supply surged and killed the motherboard? Did the software upgrade I did just before rebooting break something? Did I make a mistake in a configuration file? I fully believed that I might be charged on the order of £150 to call out an engineer to plug in a monitor and see what was going on. (I'd never have been able to pay that, so I'd have had to wait until at least Monday, and still probably been charged £50 or so.)
Very fortunately, in the end, I will only be charged £20+VAT for the privilege of using a semi-automated KVM over IP (keyboard, video and mouse over the internet) service. The actual fixing of the configuration issue took about two minutes. Getting the ISP to set it up -- and then fix it when it wasn't working -- and then fix it again because it stopped working -- took about three hours. A colossal waste of time.
I need a very stiff drink. Unfortunately I don't have any to hand, so I will have to make do with Diet Coke.
David
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