I am a *COMPLETE* idiot at times. My radio-active.net.au Web Site that is hosted here has had some issues today. More correctly, it was down between 8:50 and 2:50.. Or put another way, it came back after six hours down. Any why was it down? Well, let me explain.

I only have one IP address… and I wanted to have two web sites connected. So what I did was assign one of the WWW sites to port 80, and the other to port 81. And the port 81 one was on a different machine. So I created a firewall rule to route packets through to this box for port 81 requests. The way I did this was create an alias called ‘EightyOne’ that contained the value 81 to be used in the rules.

So what value did I put in EightyOne? Every value between 1 and 65535!!! This pushed all my WWW traffic to another Web Server, but there was no Web Server on that machine on port 80! After close to six hours I found this. And Fixed it, by putting the value of 80 into the variable EightyOne!!! This led to the same problem.

I eventually rebooted my linux box once, my Firewall two or three times, my ADSL modem once… All because I was dumb… I just wish I could count.