Sorry for the outage. I pulled a boneheaded move and then compounded it by trying to do some networking stuff that had unintended consequences. This left daves-place down for two days, doh!

For the technically inclined, it’s actually pretty amusing. I was trying to get a second NIC going in the box remotely, played around with the networking scripts, set them as I thought was appropriate, and rebooted the box. Guess what CD I had left sitting in the machine? The Redhat 8 install CD, so the machine booted up to the installer. doh!. So I get home, discover this, pull the cd and reboot. Meanwhile though, it turns out that there is some issue prolly related to system interrupts that is causing the two NICs in the box to conflict with each other, from the OS’s perspective it thinks it is talking to one NIC when in fact the other is responding. The result of this was everything looked fine to me on my LAN, but actually the box was not responding to the outside world. Translation – no daves-place.

Anyway long story short last night I got home and shut down the second NIC so it stops grabbing an IP and the problem is temporarily solved. Now I need to dig into either routing tables or IRQ settings, not sure which yet, to solve the problem in the long run.