Today ain't been our day. We experienced two occurrences of downtime today for seemingly unrelated reasons.

The first occurred this morning when the electricity went out for about 45 minutes around 8:30 CDT. Some dog musta pissed on a pole again somewhere close-by. My son lives across town and they never have power outages - rarely even in severe storm conditions. On this side of town, the historic (read: old) section, our lights go out at least weekly. Sometimes it's just a blink, but other times for various amounts of time. It's so frustrating. I used to joke that at first rain drop or a 2 mph gust of wind our lights would go out again - but today was a lovely summer morning under blue skies with pretty puffy clouds floating about. It was hot tho. So, now I guess even hot weather takes down our grid. I hate our cheapass electric company - who btw, keeps raising rates at percentages that rival the cable company and yet won't spend the money to upgrade our equipment.

The second occurrence was this evening while I was out to dinner. I came home to a crashed computer. The only clue looks like a memory dump on screen, nothing in the logs. I suspect hardware moreso than a kernel problem. I have a nicer machine donated by a kind tuxmachines visitor that I may try to get online. I've toyed with the idea several times, but I just seem to be preoccupied with trying to make a living and keeping the site updated, that I just haven't had time to seriously devote to changing the machine out. These crashes happen about once every coupla months. It's not too often and I tend to forget about them until it happens again. If it gets bad, of course, it'll become a priority. Anyway, we were down for about 2 hours before I learned of it and then I spent a half hour cleaning up, checking the database tables, and such before I brought the site back online.

There was another occurrance of downtime last week that was the result of a ddos (well not exactly, but amounts to) attack outta China. He had us down about 45 minutes before I noticed it. Sorry about that. We aren't usually messed with too much here at tuxmachines anymore since I quit running a mail server.

Anyway, I apologize to those who might have looked for us during the downtimes today. I can't do anything about the power outages until we can afford off-site dedicated hosting, but if the server crashes continue, I will put the new machine in place.

Thanks to all the tuxmachines visitors. We love you all.