FIRE! I HAVE MADE FIRE!

One of our sites at work is hosted by a web server company that I THINK may have just been spawned by the devil himself. Or at least, one of the lesser demons of Thanatos, this much is clear. Totally unreliable, and the only thing it does with any degree of consistency or reliability is to go crashysmashybashy once a week in its earlier days.

The person in the office in charge of dealing with the product of Satan's loins is someone who actually went to school for this kind of stuff (or at least, we pay him to know this kind of stuff), but unfortunately, things are a bit slow in the office for the design department, so he got himself a nice cushy side job in Boston and only comes in here twice a week, after hours. Of course, when you have a web host that's as reliable as a leaky condom, this is nothing but a recipe for disaster.

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the server did its predictably crashysmashybashy thing, and instead of loading up our half-dozen carefully-crafted pages, it simply burped like it had eaten the entire site for an early Thanksgiving dinner, and said "Permission denied", as if the Internet as a whole had forgotten to get its hall pass signed. Since our guru was out (supposedly for the entire four-day weekend), we clung to the hope that the site might have just gone off early to visit its relatives in USENET land or something, and would be back when we were.

Monday morning, no dice. Permission still denied. I call the main number, and am pleased to hear that I'm #1 in the queue. So I kick back and listen to the hold music - I notice that they're playing all blues, which I find mildly amusing. 30 minutes later, it's ironic and annoying, as I'm STILL #1 in the queue, and STILL on hold. The worst part of it is the automated voice that pops in with a click every five minutes to remind me that I'm still on hold - that stupid click makes me think I'm actually about to be attended to. Finally, an actual human comes on, I explain the problem, and he says "Oh. You're not on the geranium server, are you?" Fighting off the urge to say "Do I SOUND like I'm on the geranium server, pal?", I simply tell him I honestly have no idea. "Yeah, it looks like you are...it went down last week and we restored as much as we could. Looks like we weren't able to restore your site."

Let's play make-believe for a minute. You're an Internet bigwig. You own a hosting company. You have a server that crashes, potentially affecting dozens if not hundreds of your customers. Do you tell them? Congratulations! You're smarter than ShitCo (yes, it's an anagram).

They do restore our account's directory to the server, and we re-upload the backup site we had locally, so we're back up and running. Sort of. For some reason, the person in charge of monitoring and answering email was getting far fewer messages than she should have, despite me restoring her account. Turns out that one of the cgi scripts that submits an online form was missing, so I re-uploaded it. Then the dreaded "Internal Server Error" comes up, which, of course, could mean ANYTHING. All week long I've been hacking away with not much success, to the point where even the directory we use to submit tickets for web site problems got hosed.

Then this morning, I created fire. Turns out it was a permissions problem with the directory when I re-created it, coupled with the formmail script itself being hosed somehow. Change the permissions, grab a new version of the script, and now I know what Tom Hanks' character in Cast Away felt like.