Partial Restoration of Service
Early on Tuesday morning something on my web host caused all PHP apps that used the flock() function to hang. This meant that Expression Engine was essentially dead and that all I could do was add some info to the page that showed up when the internal server error finally came up (this would happen when the process was eventually killed by the web server).
Dreamhost support couldn’t figure out why the hang was occurring, other than to note that my home directory was mounted from one of their filers and that they are moving away from this configuration to one which uses local disk space for web files. They suggested moving my account to the newer servers and I agreed, just to get the site back up. It seems odd to me that they couldn’t fix the hang issue, but by then the site had been down for three days and I just wanted it back up.
So, the site is up on a new, faster, server. Which is good. Unfortunately the move has broken my email and I haven’t been able to receive anything since late yesterday afternoon. I’ve heard from some that they get errors sending, but from my tests the emails appear to be going into a black hole (which is the worst possible outcome, since they appear to have been sent, but have instead been discarded without error).
So, if you have need of reaching me, leave a comment. I will check back here from time to time to see if anything new has been added, and I’ll update this post when email is back up.
UPDATE: Full service has been restored. If you sent an email between approximately 4:00pm Friday and 8:00pm Saturday, please resend it.