threehv

I spent this weekend in the Lake District in the wet north-west of England. A beautiful part of the world, but one lacking in 3G connectivity. Not great for browsing (although Mobile Twitter and email were fine) but fantastic for battery life.

On Sunday morning, I awoke to find an email from a web-site monitoring service that I use, stating that a client site was down. The email was sent at 5am. It was now 10am and I had no computer, a mere GPRS connection and a hangover. Not good.

However, I fired up TouchTerm (an SSH client) on my iPhone and connected to the server in question. Connect OK. Good. Then I type sudo monit status to find out what state the server is in. All services running OK. Then cat /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/rails-mysite. This lets me examine the web-server configuration file; and I can prove to myself that I had set up aliases for the site (so that the same site is also available on an alternative web address). I then used Mobile Safari to connect on the alternative addresses and everything works fine. Lastly, I write an email to the client stating that the site is down but nothing at my end is wrong – could it be a DNS problem?

Of course, there are many phones that can do this. In fact I have had so-called “smartphones” for years – all of which are capable of connecting over SSH, over the web and over email. But the iPhone is the first where I have actually used that capability, where it’s not so painful to use that I want to try it out.

Later that day I got an email from the monitoring service stating that the site had returned. And on Monday, the client tells me that their registrar had had a failure and all of their domain names had gone down for the day.

Still, I think that’s pretty good; Sunday, with a hangover, pro-actively investigating a fault on a customer’s server, on a telephone and an antique net connection.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 10:47 pm and is filed under General, Managing Successful Projects.