Normally I would apologize for all of the downtime recently, but believe me when I say that it frustrated me more than it did you. For the first time since we moved to Denver, my IP address from Comcast changed. Normally I wouldn’t expect this to cause a huge amount of downtime, but this case was different. Just like I typically would, I updated my nameserves at zoneedit.com first. In the past this was all I ever had to do and the site would be working again within a few minutes. This time I was not so lucky. After making the changes, everyone on the outside world was probably still without access to my sites for hours. Inside my network, I could access my router admin page, but that was it. In fact anytime I tried to go to any of my sites, I was redirected to the stupid admin page. Perhaps this should have clued me in to the problem, but it didn’t. Instead I spent the vast majority of the day making changes to my apache configuration, trying to get another IP address, uninstalling software, and anything else I could think of. I got nowhere.

Finally I decided that I would try making changes to my router configuration since the admin page seemed to be the first problem. After a couple of hours of banging my head on the desk, I finally clicked this little button on one of the admin pages that says, “DHCP Renew.” At first I was a little concerned, because after I hit the button the page tried to refresh but never came back. Later I would realize that this was a good sign, since I was actually edit the router config while my address bar still said edpaffjr.com. After a hard refresh on the page, VIOLA!, everything was back to normal. The bad part is that I changed so many things throughout the day, I now have to make sure I didn’t break anything else. Don’t you just love computers?