distributedlife

Amusing Story, I finally got my EC2 server running last night. I spent a few days not configuring a Linux box properly before giving up and going Windows. I’ll have to go back to Linux at some point but in the short term a simple Apache HTTP server was all I needed.

So I get it running about 2AM last night and decide now is the time to head to bed. I disable all the ports except remote admin and lock my computer.

I get up in the morning and my box claims I don’t have any hard drives. Funny, I thought there were two.

Reboot.

None, I counted them again and there were none.

I turned it off and went to work. The only problem was my EC2 instance was still running and the digital certificate was on one of the hard disks. The best suggestion from work was to DOS the server until the server came down. Pity I closed down all but one port.

When I came home I pull the box out to have a good look at it. I suspected the hard disc controller because both HDD had failed. Either that or my cat was licking the mobo.

I turns out I was wrong. I opened up the box looked in the side of it because the cover was off and saw what could only be a half centimetre thick layer of dust and cat hair over just about every component.

I spent half an hour of picking it out using tweezers and then adding some power.

Everything is as good as new. The moral of the story is leave more ports open on your EC2 servers so you can DOS them when you need to bring them down. It could also be, if you’re forced to leave the side of your box off to increase air flow and live with a cat, clean your computer every now and again.