Fugato

“I am a computer, dumber than any human and smarter than my administrator.”

— Tech Support Slogan

Speaking of eating humble pie … this webserver (running several blogs and several other websites) was out of service for the past 12 hours or so. Why? Because, when I was going to sleep, I casually told my home computer to “shutdown -h now” (where -h means “halt”, i.e. don’t reboot, just turn off) … except that just before doing so, I connected to the webserver to check something … and forgot to disconnect. So I was not talking to my home computer, I was talking to the webserver. Which is located in a closet in a closed-off room in a networking facility somewhere in town that I have no access to.

Whoo-oops!

The lessons: if you log on as root to your webserver, and you want it to stay up, and you have a fallible, human mind, you’ll want to rename that shutdown command to ReallyHonestlyPleaseShutdownAndYesIDoMeanThatEarnestly.

But something good (slightly) must come of this: for the anxious, here is a Windows batch file (first I start working in Marketing and now I’m programming Windows batch files? I see pointy hair in my future) that will keep pinging a given IP address until it gets a response, and then beep. It sets the window title as “down” while it isn’t getting responses, and then as “UP” when it does, so you can just run it in a cmd window and minimize it, and the status will be in your taskbar.

pingandbeepwhenup.bat

Usage: pingandbeepwhenup <IP addr> [timeout in millisecs, default 30000]
Example: pingandbeepwhenup 213.176.151.74

This entry was posted on Monday, July 4th, 2005 at 1:08 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.