Seems the hosts of this server, Softlayer, experienced a power failure in the data centre in which I’m located, subjecting this machine to an unexpected reboot. Now, I should have tested this before – one of the traps with running an OS which basically never needs to be rebooted is that one rarely tests a reboot – but it seems I had failed to set httpd and, worse, named, as chkconfig on!
I don’t know how that slipped my mind. Everything else came back up just fine. I guess I just assumed, at the time, that httpd and named started by default – I don’t remember. Anyway, I really should have checked sometime in the year since this server was last rebooted. Ah well. Anyway, all good now.
In other news, I’m thinking about upgrading this server – it’s getting a bit long in the tooth now and for the same money I can probably get a beefier machine. That in itself might not be worth the hassle but I’m also considering migrating from RHEL to a debian system – perhaps Ubuntu Server, although I’ll try it out locally first. I have no complaints about RHEL5 – it’s an excellent distribution, highly reliable, and I haven’t had a single problem with it. But it seems debian-based linux is better supported in many new projects and I’m sick of feeling like I’m the only one trying to run $interesting_new_software on a RHEL system. Well, let’s see.
In other upcoming changes, I’m going to switch to Ruby 1.9.1 one of these days – just got to clean up one legacy app. I guess I can run 1.9 in parallel, but I’d like to do it all at once. To the future!