Linux Today experienced a rare malfunction between 22 and 2300
hours UTC when the ethernet interface failed between the Web site’s
two servers.
Linux Today readers who were logged into user accounts got the
following message:
Warning: Can’t connect to MySQL server on bigserver
(113) in db_mysql.inc on line 32
Database error: Link-ID == false, pconnect failed
MySQL Error: 0 ()
Session halted.
when they tried to access the Linux Today home page.
Readers who were not logged in experienced no interruption of
service.
An investigation showed that the Web server was hanging when it
was unable to communicate with the MySQL database server to access
user account preferences.
Stephen Denny of Hex.Net in
Dallas, Texas, where the Linux Today servers are co-located, was
quickly called. As it was a Friday evening and no techs were
currently at the site, he recommended trying to restart the
interfaces on each server by using the ifdown command. But
after
ifdown eth1
and
ifdown /dev/eth1
did not produce the desired result, quick thinking Linux Today
system administrator Paul Ferris, logged in to the servers remotely
with ssh from Louisville, Ohio, suggested a reboot of the Web
server. If this did not work, a tech would have to be dispatched to
the site (probably Denny himself as his men had gone home).
But a few minutes after Paul issued the rarely used command:
shutdown -r now
from his command line, he reported to us over the phone the
happy news that the ethernet interface had come back up in the
successful reboot and that the full functionality of Linux Today
had been restored.
The Linux Today Web server had last been rebooted 161 days
ago.