For about ten minutes last night, my web server was down. For some reason.

It’s Dead Jim

It started when I was adding a reverse proxy to caddy. At first, things were working fine. Until the rule seemed to stop working. At first I thought the back end server for what I was testing, stopped. Nope, it was running fine. But then I noticed, I couldn’t get my blog to load…

My internet is provided by Comcast. So my first thought was that they were having issues¹. But the router wasn’t reporting issues, and eBird loaded just fine. So my server was having an issue. Great.

So I logged into DigitalOcean, and yeah, shit’s fucked. Opening the recovery, no keyboard response. So, I hit the power button, and quickly realized my mistake.

So, the VM was completely locked up, and I just requested a graceful shutdown… That wasn’t going to work. I couldn’t use the hard power cycle button, it was disabled due to the pending shutdown. Thankfully, after about six minutes, DO gave up, and forced shutdown the VM.

The very first thing I did, was take a snapshot.

Then I pressed my luck, and powered up the VM. And, everything started up fine.

What Happened

So, what happened. I went digging, looking though system logs, and the daily UNIX mail that FreeBSD sends the root account. After a lot of reading, I came to a conclusion. I have no damn clue.

I went ahead and added a cron job to reboot the server once a month. Will that help, no idea. But it won’t hurt.