I may vocally deny that that I’m pretty smart in most social and work settings, but in my gooey insides, I often smugly proclaim “I am so smart.” This sometimes conflicts with objective evidence to the contrary, and then my ego goes “owie!” and slinks away to lick its wounds. Do you like how I abstract away my ego when it suits me? Like it’s not at all a huge facet of my being.

I’m bad at so many things. It’s a wonder I can feed myself.

Today’s fiasco was this website. I like to run it pretty lean. It’s not fancy. But system requirements grow as upgrades happen, and the database finally outgrew it’s school clothes, and it was time to add additional memory. That’s another couple of bucks a month for my vanity.

Since we’re upgrading the hardware, why not the OS, too? That actually goes pretty well.

Now it’s time to check the websites. That one little dumb one. Check. The serious one. Check. groink.net? groink.net? groink.net? Hmm…

Let’s bump the web service. No joy. Kick the database service. Nope. But all the other sites are working. Why? WHY? The configuration looks ok — like I said, its pretty simple. php-fpm? Yep, the right version for what’s installed. Grrr.

I mindlessly restart services and reboot the server several times, more for self-soothing than hoping for any positive result. Maybe I’m getting DDOS’d, my ego chimes in. I check stats; unique visitors is below 1k for the month. My fanbase is primarily bots and scrapers. Back in your hole, ego!

I’ll save you further reading of an already boring story: it was the AAAA record. For some reason, Cloudflare prefers the IPv6 address my hosting service provides. When I updated the host’s memory, it was shuffled off to another rack and got reassigned another IPv6 address. IPv4 stayed the same. Guess what I only ever look at?

The last bit of chagrin: I’m writing about my website…on my website.

…

Fuck.